Six MadCap fans met at 3di’s offices in Ripley for the first MadSIG meeting to eat cake, drink coffee and talk about MadCap. Tom Brindley told us about his time at MadWorld 2013 which was held at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego in April this year.
We were all envious of Tom, in those classy surroundings, with such wonderful sessions about MadCap products (although there was a tools-agnostic stream too) and plenty of opportunities to rub shoulders with the gods at MadCap . As one of the MadCap staff said during the conference, most tool vendors have users, but MadCap has groupies. You can see Tom’s slides here: https://www.istc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/MadWorld-2013-slides-only.pptx
After Tom’s talk, we ate more cake to console ourselves about not having been there, and got to know each other a bit better. Several of us are sole authors, and it was lovely to hear about how others work with Flare. In future meetings, we hope to share more of our experiences and tips and tricks with each other.
Tom also reminded us that as a group, we can lobby MadCap for features and bug fixes. In one of the sessions at MadWorld this year, Madcap asked “If you were project manager, what would be your must-have feature?”. Now, where do I start? As much as I love Flare, there are many things I’d like to see added to make it even more useful, and a few things I’d like to see changed, as well as some bugs I’d like to see fixed.
The group mentioned a few topics that we’d like to hear about in future meetings, including
- Single sourcing for print and online
- Sole authoring
- Flare as a lightweight content management system
- Flare vs DITA
- Flare and Agile
Anyone who uses the MadCap authoring products or is interested in finding out more about them is welcome at MadSIG meetings. If there’s a topic you’d particularly like to hear about, or if you have something MadCap-related you could share with us, please get in touch (details below). You don’t need to be a member of the ISTC to join us, so tell your colleagues!
For more information, contact madsig@istc.org.uk or find us on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=5081593&trk=my_groups-b-grp-v