MadCap Blaze

[Bill Swallow]

> 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.

This was one of the disconnects I had. Why only print? Who does only
print these days? Even FrameMaker out of the box does more than print.
So you need Flare AND Blaze to do print and Help? Seems like overhead
to me, and I don't understand this business model at all.

>  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.

Topic oriented writing has its advantages, and so does DITA, which is
much more granular than topic oriented. There are advantages to DITA
over topic oriented if you have a need to use the same content in
multiple spots (like a note, definition, or anything else smaller than
a topic) or across product documents. I was rather unimpressed, to be
honest, when I learned that Blaze didn't support DITA. That, IMHO,
gives FrameMaker a huge leg up over Blaze.

>  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 didn't have an answer for me, either.

>  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.

Right. There shouldn't be a dependency on a proprietary CMS for Flare
and Blaze if the content is indeed XML (which it's not).

-- 
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager
http://techcommdood.blogspot.com