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1. #Modern madcap experiment manuals
2. #Modern madcap experiment software
3. #Modern madcap experiment trial

“We now make heavier use of TOCs, but we still use some conditional text for the design of our website.” “Conditional text is one of the big reasons we switched from FrameMaker ® to MadCap Flare,” Stewart observes. as needed for documentation supporting different solution offerings and users. Conditional text allows the xMatters team to automatically insert specific terms, product names, brands, etc. For example, what was on six pages is now one web page with expandable text.”įrom early on, conditional text functionality in Flare has been used to create different documentation outputs quickly and easily. “With Flare, we’ve had the opportunity to rethink the content. “We knew we would be making changes when we went from linear print documentation to online content that has a more exploratory feel,“ Stewart explained. The topic-based authoring approach of Flare, combined with a range of other features–such as conditional text, table of contents (TOC), and cascading style sheets (CSS)–has enabled the xMatters team to change its approach to developing and delivering content.

#Modern madcap experiment trial

Stewart noted, “Using the trial version of Flare, we were able to determine that the import functionality was robust enough to take a lot of the pain out of creating the type of web and print documentation that we needed.”

#Modern madcap experiment software

Additionally, xMatters recognized the need to support software solutions acquired by the company, which would require the technical publications team to import product information into Flare in order to make it available as both web-based Help and PDFs. Initially, this included a range of existing product guides designed for print publication. One such challenge was migrating thousands of pages of documentation to the online Help system. You could really tell that Flare had been thought through by documentation professionals.” Leveraging and Importing Existing Content “When we experimented with the features in our trial version of MadCap Flare, it became strikingly obvious that it was the product we needed. “Flare checked off a lot of the boxes of features we needed to support a cloud product in addition to the on-premises software,” Stewart explained. An evaluation of authoring tools quickly led the team to MadCap Flare. Additionally, they wanted the flexibility to customize the table of contents (TOC) and provide various cross-references to support different groups of users.

Instead, the xMatters technical publications team realized they needed to move to modern software capable of publishing to multiple channels from a single content source.

#Modern madcap experiment manuals

“For awhile, we were maintaining two sets of PDF manuals with FrameMaker ®, but it just wasn’t meeting our needs.”

“We used Adobe ® FrameMaker ® for about five years, but we could see that the future of documentation was going to be online, and PDF documentation wasn’t going to be so prevalent,“ recalls Cameron Stewart, xMatters technical publications product manager.

This created the need to publish both web and PDF documentation. However, as more xMatters customers migrated to the company’s cloud-based solutions, they wanted to access information online. The latter were first created in Microsoft ® Word, and then later using Adobe ® FrameMaker ®, which was better suited for long documentation formats. For years, customers primarily purchased xMatters software to use on-premises, and the company initially produced printed manuals and downloadable PDF files. XMatters’ approach to documentation has evolved over time with the business. Evolving Business Drives New Content Delivery Demands