MadCap Blaze

[Flato, Gillian]

Sharon Burton, from MadCap, did a presentation at our last STC meeting. She said that Blaze was for people who only did print publishing and Flare was for print and help files etc. 

Both Blaze and Flare make you write in a topic-oriented way, yet it doesn't do DITA. Sharon talked about all of the advantages of doing topic-oriented writing. 

I asked her why MadCap would make a product that doesn't do DITA when they are trying to compete with Frame. I said that right now, with Frame 8, all I had to do was flip it to structured and I had DITA, so moving to Blaze or Flare was a step backward. She didn't really have an answer for me on that.

She said that Madcap was creating a CMS first, and then it was going to make Blaze and Flare DITA compatible. I told her that in my opinion, that was a bad plan. They will never be competitive with Frame until they do DITA, and no one is going to buy a CMS when they can get Subversion and CVS for free so they would be better off doing DITA now and the CMS later.

I don't know if she passed on what I said to the MadCap people but we'll see. 


Thank you,

 

Gillian Flato
Technical Writer (Software)
nanometrics
1550 Buckeye Dr. 
Milpitas, CA. 95035
408.545.6316
408.232.5911
gflato at nanometrics.com


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Michael Müller-Hillebrand
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 9:17 AM
To: Frame Users
Subject: Re: MadCap Blaze

Am 19.03.2008 um 17:05 schrieb Rick Henkel:

> Flare has more than Blaze. Kind of like   Flare : Blaze ::  
> Acrobat : Reader

They must have something up their sleeve... or why did they once  
position Blaze as FrameMaker killer? You wouldn't expect a serious  
company to exaggerate things like that, would you? Maybe I forgot,  
that in marketing everything is allowed...

Well, FrameMaker is still listed two times on the Blaze website: As  
possible import format and as output format (which would only be  
necessary if the products own print layout capabilities are somewhat  
limited).

BTW, I am hesitant to install .NET 3.0 and enjoy your reports!

- Michael

--
_______________________________________________________________
Michael Müller-Hillebrand: Dokumentations-Technologie
Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker
Lösungen und Training, FrameScript, XML/XSL, Unicode
<http://cap-studio.de/> -- Tel. +49 (9131) 28747



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