Report on MadSIG Meeting 6th March 2014 Ripley

Nine of us met at 3di’s offices in Ripley on 6th March to eat cake, drink coffee and chat with friends.  Oh, and we may have had a meeting of the MadCap UK and Europe Users Group too, in between mouthfuls of cake and sips of coffee.
I explained how I’d single-sourced content for WebHelp and PDF output, and also for three different products and two different brandings. We had plenty of lively discussion, and learned a lot from each other. The following day also saw several attendees emailing each other to pass on hints and tips from their own experiences as a result of discussions that had taken place the previous evening.
We managed to link in two virtual callers as an experiment as well. This was reasonably successful, so we hope to do this again to enable people who can’t easily get to the venue to attend. Unfortunately, the cake and coffee transfer protocol still eludes us, so virtual attendees will need to provide their own cake and coffee for the foreseeable future.
We’re very grateful to 3di for allowing us to use their offices and facilities, and to 3di’s Erika Norton who gamely managed the presentation technology so that our virtual guinea pigs could participate as fully as the technology allowed.
Here are the slides from the presentation. To get the full benefit of the animations, I suggest you watch them as a slideshow, rather than just opening them in PowerPoint’s default editing mode.
If anyone would like to present a session about some aspect of how they use Flare or the other MadCap products in their work, please do get in touch. This is your group and the sessions will be as interesting as you make them. You don’t need to prepare a polished presentation – you don’t even need to use a single PowerPoint slide unless you want to – a short “show and tell” demonstration will be sufficient. You will find that people will be very willing to contribute to the discussion.
Keep a look out on our LinkedIn page http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=5081593 for details of the next event. If you’re a MadCap user in the UK and Europe, please join us on LinkedIn  if you haven’t already done so. Feel free to start a discussion about what you’d like from the group, or about any other group-related topic. You are very welcome to post there, but note that for general questions about MadCap Flare, you would do better to post on the world-wide LinkedIn group “Users of MadCap Flare” http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Users-MadCap-Flare-86373, or the MadCap forums http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/index.php, as your question will reach a wider audience.
Marjorie Jones
MadSIG@istc.org.uk