Multiple Tech Authors and Flare

[mkenn]

Hi, apologies if this has been asked a million times before, but a search through the forum didn't really give me the answer I was looking for...
I have just started at a new company with another Tech Author (we both started on the same day), where the previous TA was a lone writer who used Flare for her projects. Neither of us newbies have used Flare before and we're having to pick up where she left off without any handover as she left a while ago.
IT dutifully installed Flare on both of our machines, but now we're struggling with how we both use it to work on the same product suite. Using it on a shared drive is impossibly slow, it''s unworkable. But having it on our individual machines separately means that we lose the ability to truly single source or to work on different parts of the same manuals.
We can't be the only ones in this situation - how do other multi-writer teams out there do it?
Any hints/tips/suggestions would be very much appreciated.

[Nita Beck]

Welcome to the forums!

You should be using source control. Read up on source control in the Flare documentation: https://help.madcapsoftware.com/flare20 ... ontrol.htm. Also work with your IT department to get their recommendations. A best practice is to use the same source control platform that others in your company are already using so that you have readily-available advisors.

Also, there is a Source Control forum here in the user forums: viewforum.php?f=68.

I hope this helps. I'm just trying to point you in the direction of research that you should do.

[ChoccieMuffin]

And be aware that you don't have to use the source control functionality built into Flare if you don't want to, you can use source control very successfully outside of Flare. (And as Nita says, welcome to the forums.)

[mattf]

Hi CM,
We tried to use Flare on SVN without "binding" it to SVN inside Flare, and we found that while doing our checkins and updates with TortoiseSVN works fine in most cases, if we moved a file or changed a file name we sank our dinghy real quick. It caused enormous problems. But you say you can use Flare quite successfully without using the native Flare source control support. How do you deal with the moved files or changed filenames if Flare does not internally know it's happening? Don't the original files stay on the server forever then? I would desperately like to believe what you say, because at my last place of emp., we successfully used Flare with a Git repo and used SourceTree to do checkins and pushes and pulls. It worked like a charm unless we both updated the same file at the same time, which we quickly learned not to do. I'd really love to "unbind" but it's led to problems at my new place, and the devs who looked at my situation said that it should be bound or it wouldn't work right.

I would love to hear more about it from your perspective.
-Matt

[Nita Beck]

For the record, I didn't mean to suggest that you should ONLY use Flare's integrated source control functionality. Rather, I just mean that you should be using source control, period, however you get there. I have some Flare projects for which I do use Flare's integrated source control functionality. I have other projects for which I don't and instead use a third-party client such as SourceTree or TortoiseSVN. As I said, discuss with your IT department to get their recommendations.

Regarding renaming/moving a file AND making changes to the same file, in my experience, DON'T DO THAT! Keep a rename/move operation separate from a modify operation. First rename/move and commit, and then do your update and commit. OR, first do your update and commit, and then do your rename/move and commit.

[mattf]

Hi Nita,
It sounds like you're saying that as long as you don't modify a file in the same commit as you move it or change its name, then the latter won't be a problem. True? I was told by smart people near my cubicle that the only way this wouldn't break everything was if I had my project bound internally with Flare's native source control support. They aren't Flare experts, but they're SVN experts. Again, I'd love to find out they were wrong.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Hi CM,
We tried to use Flare on SVN without "binding" it to SVN inside Flare, and we found that while doing our checkins and updates with TortoiseSVN works fine in most cases, if we moved a file or changed a file name we sank our dinghy real quick. It caused enormous problems. But you say you can use Flare quite successfully without using the native Flare source control support. How do you deal with the moved files or changed filenames if Flare does not internally know it's happening? Don't the original files stay on the server forever then? I would desperately like to believe what you say, because at my last place of emp., we successfully used Flare with a Git repo and used SourceTree to do checkins and pushes and pulls. It worked like a charm unless we both updated the same file at the same time, which we quickly learned not to do. I'd really love to "unbind" but it's led to problems at my new place, and the devs who looked at my situation said that it should be bound or it wouldn't work right.

I would love to hear more about it from your perspective.
-Matt

Hi Matt.

If I move (or add) a file in Flare, then in File Explorer I have to ADD the new file otherwise SVN doesn't know it's there. Unfortunately, doing it that way does lose the file's history, but that's not usually a problem. Say, for example, I've moved a file from \Content\Folder1 to \Content\Folder2, when I check in the whole project the file is shown as "missing" from Folder1 but in TortoiseSVN the checkbox is not selected. To delete it from it's "old" location, ensure you select the check boxes for anything "missing". Works for me, but I have to admit I do sometimes forget to add new files to SVN outside of Flare, so my automated build fails...