MadCap Flare vs. XMetaL Author

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

Incentivized

• Organizing articles via an overall project outline.
• Syncing with teammates.

Incentivized

• Reviewing by internal users / Feedback from customers
• CSS - easier to use an external tool
• Skin styles and management

MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare provides for proper single-sourcing of content for an array of needs. Wikis are incredibly limited, static and hard to manage, and content quickly becomes obsolete.

• Negative: Wasted hundreds of hours troubleshooting madcap bugs or quirks.
• Positive: We have a robust Help website we can update with ease.

Incentivized