Document collaboration (without MadCap Contribute)

[kwag_myers]

Leeds me to the question, if a significantly smaller company like Crocodoc can manage to perfect PDF to HTML5 conversion, why can't the billion dollar Google get even close to a decent conversion?

I realize this is off topic, but I talked with a network buddy over the weekend and he told me there's a trend of Fortune 500 companies who have switched to Google and switched back to Microsoft (Outlook, Word, etc.). I think Google stock may be about to take a plunge.

[sdcinvan]

Leeds me to the question, if a significantly smaller company like Crocodoc can manage to perfect PDF to HTML5 conversion, why can't the billion dollar Google get even close to a decent conversion?

I realize this is off topic, but I talked with a network buddy over the weekend and he told me there's a trend of Fortune 500 companies who have switched to Google and switched back to Microsoft (Outlook, Word, etc.). I think Google stock may be about to take a plunge.

I'd like to see Google take a kick in the pants for their seemingly almost belligerent and uncaring attitude towards businesses using their Google Apps product. But surprisingly Google's Google Apps for business platform brings in less than 1% of their total revenue. If Microsoft took away all their Google Apps business, I think it would barely make a dent in their stocks.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-ap ... tner/60880

[kellyh_hochanadel]

I use Word for reviews as well; I just send them with the caveat that the focus is on the content, not the layout.

[doc_guy]

Yeah. Google revenue was about 15 billion last year. Considering a Google Apps account is only about $60/user/year, it would take roughly 17 million Apps users to generate even 1 billion dollars in revenue -- which is still less than 7% of their annual revenue.

[sdcinvan]

Yeah. Google revenue was about 15 billion last year. Considering a Google Apps account is only about $60/user/year, it would take roughly 17 million Apps users to generate even 1 billion dollars in revenue -- which is still less than 7% of their annual revenue.

In other words, things that don't work well (or at all) will take years to correct. I've been using Google Apps for about four years now and I can recall about three insignificant updates, mostly low-success attempts at fixing some minor bugs (never the big things), and a predictable visit to the never-ending calendar sync problems. In four years, I don't recall a single significant new feature.

Sneaking back on topic, thank goodness MadCap Flare's major updates are always exciting.

[hjnb]

Hey Shawn,

Nice to hear from another Linux shop. We have unique issues that rarely show up in the forums.

I don't have a clean solution to your question. We have contributor but I haven't really fielded it for reviews yet (creating the packets and doing tech support on the product itself would take too much time away from writing actual content just now) but I am hopeful that I will be able to use to at least get me out of copying and pasting bad LibreOffice and/or wiki content reviews/input into Flare topics.

My environment is mostly Linux and my SMEs use a mix of Windows and Macs when they aren't using various flavours of Linux. I am told that Contributor does work reasonably well in a Windows vm using Parallels on a Mac so I was thinking about how I could make that work for me.

Cloud is not an option for me. I do publish Flare output to an internal server so I mostly end up my people to check the site for the most current output and give me feedback through whatever method works for them.

I had hopes that I could co-ordinate my drafts with our wiki pages -- publish selected topics to the wiki and allow for markup and then import the marked up web pages into the product. That may still happen but as of now, our Drupal implementation's css/html and Flare's don't collaborate very well.

I have to create Word output but not as review copy. The Word output it is less than turn-key but through a mix of page layouts, master pages and other devices it actually does what it needs to do.

[Msquared]

Wow guys! You have just made my day.

Decent Word output via PDF and Adobe Acrobat! Not a style to be seen I know, but some of my users wouldn't know what to do with them even if they were.

I have noticed after years of diabolical Word outputs (for things like auto-numbers, which I use in many styles), that Flare now complains loudly that it doesn't support auto-numbers, so at least it now has the grace to admit it's going to screw up.

Why on earth Flare doesn't support Word output using a pre-existing Word template file and user-defined style mappings from the Flare styles to the Word template styles, goodness knows. I seem to remember that R***help was good at that?

[sdcinvan]

Hello Marjorie,

I was going to vigorously pursue this issue with MadCap but since finding that Flare > PDF > Word is a workable solution, I decided not to bother them about this issue, in the hopes that MadCap will focus on other Flare and Capture issues.

Still, I take issue with their marketing line, "Publish content to a growing number of formats including HTML5, WebHelp, PDF, Word, XHTML, EPUB, DITA and more" If one is expecting usable results from either Word or the ePub formats, they are going to be very disappointed. To be fair, I am sure Flare does a reasonable job converting basic text to these formats. But complex documents? Forget it!