MadCap Blaze

[Sharon Burton]

****Vendor Post****

I've been at WritersUA and away from my personal email since Sunday. I got
back late last night. I'm the product manager for Blaze. (BTW - great
conference!)

Some clarifications: Blaze is the younger sister of Flare 4. If you need
complex print and online docs, then you want Flare 4. If you only need
printed output, then you want Blaze. Everything that's in Blaze will be in
Flare 4.

Blaze is a fully featured print authoring and publishing system. It imports
and exports Frame and Word because you may have a workflow that requires you
to import from or export to these formats for some reason. We want to
account for that.

However, you don't *need* to export to Frame to get your output if your
workflow doesn't require that. You can import existing Word or Frame
documents and you're good to go. Then you can directly create PDFs or XPSs
as your deliverables, with the content for those deliverables based on your
Outlines.

Our page design and layout in Blaze is robust so there's no need to export
to Frame if your workflow doesn't require Frame as an output.

One of the biggest differences in Blaze - and really, Flare - is that you
are not authoring long documents, but rather you're authoring topics. Then,
using Outlines, you put together the topics into the deliverables; for
example, a User's Guide and an Admin Guide.

There's nothing to prevent you from authoring just like you do in Word of
Frame in that you can open a new topic in Blaze and then write a 200 page
document in one topic. But by doing that, you lose the power of topic-based
content development that easily allows content reuse across multiple
deliverables for one or more projects.

I strongly urge you to attend one of my online demos to learn more about the
paradigm shift for Blaze. If you are not aware of the shift and just click
Next in the import wizard, you are going to wind up with a mess. I go over
that in the demos. (Don't try to signup for a few hours, as all the
scheduled demos for the next 6 weeks are full and I have to schedule more.
Give me until about 9am Pacific today, please.)

As to our newly announced product Press, it's for glossy print materials,
like Annual reports or other glossy printed material. It's related to our
other products, but it's not the only press solution. As to DITA or CMS,
check out our just announced product Team Server. It's a workflow management
tool that's amazing. We have ideas about what it should do but we want your
input about what you need that tool to do.

I'm delighted to answer questions about Blaze or any of our products. If you
could send those questions to my MadCap email, that would help me a lot.
sburton at madcapsoftware.com, please.

sharon

Sharon Burton
MadCap Software
Product Manager
sburton at madcapsoftware.com
http://madcapsoftware.wordpress.com