MadCap Flare vs. MadCap Xyleme

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

Well-suited:

1. Building and keeping up to date modular content (blocks).
2. Maintaining and updating large content library where meaning team members might be working on the same content but using the content in different context (e.g. learning and internal comms).
3. Creating learning content by new/recently onboarded team members.
4. Create simple learning courses with some level of interactively, medium interactivity (tabs, image maps, slider reveal images), create different types of knowledge checks/assessments from multiple choice to drag and drop activities); embed videos and other HTML elements .
5. Integrate with LMS, apply SCORM rules etc
6. Better to use in combination with other media creation tools like Vyond, Storyline. Some things can get tricky (compatibility).

Less appropriate: 1. If you need to build highly interactive learning experience 2. When you don't have a team member you can dedicate specifically to customize templates in Xyleme for your organizational needs (looks, functionality etc.) or and to train team members on this software. You'd need someone on your team to collaborate with Xyleme closely to customize functions for your organization's needs. 3. When #2 and you want a modern/in trend looking output and not willing to compromise on what it looks and feels.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• content reuse (linked content modules). Update content block in one place and it updates in all the other places where this block is used (linked)
• easy to train on and onboard new team members
• flexibility of output templates
• web-based tool - easy to develop directly from browser

Incentivized

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

• several features advertised as device agnostic or mobile friendly do not work properly on mobile
• finicky in many ways, sometimes you need to tinker with details for to long to make things work properly
• many UI solutions/elements that are not intuitive at all (even using the tool almost every day you need to make effort to remember how things are done)

Incentivized

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

• train and onboard new learning developers on the team quickly and get them started to create courses
• ROI - don't have access to this information

Incentivized