MadCap Flare Chosen Over Content Management Systems for Project, Facilitated Delivery of 12 Print and Online Deliverables

LA JOLLA, Calif., Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- MadCap Software, the leader in multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft XPS, today announced that Intentional Design has completed a major health management training documentation project in six weeks using MadCap Flare. By taking advantage of Flare's topic-based authoring and single-source, multi-channel publishing, three Intentional Design consultants produced 12 print and online deliverables in roughly half the time usually allocated for projects of similar scope.

Intentional Design, based in Vancouver, Canada, is a consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations to create and better manage their business-critical content. In Spring 2008, the firm was contracted by a regional health authority implementing a comprehensive enterprise health management system. The authority required a range of training materials to support the new system, which would be delivered as Word documents, PDF files and online content. Because of the tight project timeframe, Intentional Design needed a content solution that would enable rapid development and modification across all three channels.

'We looked at a number of authoring and content management system (CMS) options,' said Rahel Bailie, president of Intentional Design, former board member of the Society of Technical Communication (STC), and current chair of the Canada West Chapter of CM Pros. 'I couldn't imagine us building the content in a CMS and having to struggle with XSL style sheets. We couldn't have developed the system in time, and ongoing changes would have been exorbitantly expensive.'

'In contrast,' Ms. Bailie noted, 'Flare was the best fit for the project with its topic-based authoring and ability to publish to multiple channels from a single source file. It meant we could simply turn on or off the variance to deliver training materials and supporting documentation to different audiences in the appropriate format.'

The project included 12 deliverables from a single pool of content: 3 course instructor guides, 3 student guides, 2 user guides, 2 online tutorials for different groups of users, a print version of one online tutorial, and a topic-based knowledge base. Using Flare, a change in the source content would be reflected over any number of these deliverables, depending on the topic. Flare also generated the content in Word files, so Intentional Design's customer could easily mark it up.