What's your opinion about Contributor?

[jgoldstein]

I'm mighty weary of exchanging Word files with my SMEs in the field, especially since I use Flare for most everything else. I'm curious about MadCap Contributor and am wondering if it might make my remote review process easier. If you've used or are using Contributor, what are your thoughts and opinions? What are the limitations? Which features were the most useful? If you evaluated the product and decided not to use it, what led you to that conclusion?

Thanks in advance,

Joan

[wclass]

We evaluated it and rejected it when it was called X-Edit - there are some comments on the forum here:
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... 67&t=12286
The upgrade to Contributor has certainly included some of the functionality that many of us thought was missing, and so more and more people are now finding it useful. I still find it too fiddly to use and much prefer using Word for my external reviewers.

For me, I think the real issue is making reviewers use another tool. The Contributor workflow puts the emphasis on the tool rather than the content and this just does not work for me. Having updates made directly to the file(s) by SMEs does NOT save me time - in my experience external reviewers do not understand structure and styles and snippets, etc.

I've probably moved the discussion into workflow philosophy now, and that is going to be a little bit different for everyone. Anyway, I'll expand my thoughts here as I think the edit/review process is still something that we need to understand.

When people talk about "reviewing" they can mean many different things. We actually distinguish several levels of edit, or review.
Authors should perform a "mechanical" edit on their topics as they create them - check spelling and grammar, headings and styles applied, navigation and links work, images are correct, etc. This is something you have to do in Flare.
When the first draft is ready, it needs a "copyedit" - is it clear, concise, are the procedural steps correct, does it follow our standards, is it structured or organised so that the content is findable and usable? At this stage if you find spelling errors and other mechanical issues, they should be fixed as well. A copyedit is best done by someone else on the team, and they can access the full Flare project and make updates. I am happy for other team members to make changes.
External SMEs/reviewers should be concerned with a "content review". Is it correct and complete? And is it usable - the structure as a whole might be commented on, but not to the level of what should be in a snippet.

I think Contributor works more as a copyedit tool rather than and external content review tool. I admit I am lucky to be part of a team where we can easily copyedit each other's work - with a Flare licence each we don't need Contributor. If I was a lone author, I might have a very different view.

[ChoccieMuffin]

When it comes to getting an external reviewer to look over what I've done, I produce a PDF and ask them to add comments in Acrobat. I know that's no comment at all on Contributor but might be another suggestion you might want to consider.

[jgoldstein]

Thanks for the input. I think my big concern was how well non-tech writers would be willing to use a different tool, other than the Wiki or their beloved Word.

When I was part of a team, I did follow a lot of the steps that wclass talks about. Now that I'm a sole writer, I get to do most of those steps myself, except for the content review/edit

I do use PDF for some reviews - usually the online help because it works better than trying to get things formatted happily in Word. The developers used to comment in the PDFs but lately, they seem happier to just send me email or talk to me in person. Possibly because we're using SCRUM and my reviews are usually small chunks of content.

I have a lot of content from our solution architects that I edit more than write -- they write the original in Word and then we email versions of the file back and forth (no, we don't have a content management tool that everyone uses -- I can't even get these folks to use a company file share as a place to store source files -- they always ask me to email them the files).

[lacastle]

When I evaluated X-Edit, I determined that it was too complicated for my SMEs to learn just to review a document. I usually send them a Word version to mark up with changes highlighted/in a different color/tracked. I haven't tried Contributor, but it looks like it would be the same type of interface.