MadCap Software Forums

Hi there,

This is my first post so I hope I entered it in the right category.

The company I started working for wants to move to topic based authoring and after some extensive testing I advised to use Madcap Flare. In the long run more tech writers will come in so I'm already thinking about linking to a CCMS for source control reasons. Our mechanical department will be starting to use PTC Windchill as a CMS (and later also for lifecycle management) so I'm wondering if I might be able to hook into that system as well. I will definitely move output from Flare in there to link to our machine components, but using it as a real CCMS for topic management would be great of course.

After talking to the project team I've learned that Windchill operates with a local and an online Workspace which gets synched, and does indeed provide source control. I'm not to sure however about 3 things:
1. Flare definitely doesn't have a plugin (yet) to offer source control towards Windchill directly in the Flare UI.
2. Flare cannot "talk" to the offline Workspace of Windchill (so I'm told...)
3. The whole lifecycle management behind it doesn't seem to be the right environment to manage X thousand Flare topics, but I might be wrong on that.

Does anybody here have experience in using Flare together with Windchill as CCMS?

many thanks

regards

David

We decided to start using TFS for source control, but maybe the question remains valid for others...

I can tell you that I know first hand that for a variety of reasons the documentation team at PTC did not use Windchill as a source repository for documentation files.

Hello,
I would very much like to learn more if possible about what DavidSkoglund mentioned, about PTC not using Windchill as a source repository for documentation files.

My company wants to move to a content management system for documentation and I am looking into it. Some offices are already using Windchill for content management (I don't know details yet, such as whether they are using it for user documentation) but their content is not directly related to ours, so our options are not restricted to Windchill (at least not yet). I was just told that I could use these other offices as a resource to help us in making our choice.

Some writers in my division (I am new here) are using MadCap Flare/Lingo and very fond of it. so like the OP, I was wondering if there was some way of bridging MadCap and Windchill.

Any information would be appreciated. Thank you!

Hi Sandra

Just wanted to welcome you to the forums, though I don't have an answer to your question as we use SVN here (but outside of Flare's implementation of it). Hope you get some replies.