One of the key selling points for MadCap Flare has been that it was created by some of the original RoboHelp developers who were laid off from Macromedia after it bought eHelp. That seems to have struck a chord with a lot of writers who liked the original RoboHelp and didn’t think that Macromedia, or later Adobe, treated it well. However Adobe has been putting a lot more effort into RoboHelp and FrameMaker development and the current RoboHelp is much improved from the RoboHelp of five years ago. Some authors who used Flare may now be wanting to go back to RoboHelp.
John Daigle writes:
It was that fear, uncertainty and doubt that caused some RoboHelpers to give Flare a try. After all, it was developed by former members of the old eHelp RoboHelp team. The assumption was that it would have the look and feel and usability of the original RoboHelp. But, for many, it was a disappointment. Not that Flare didn’t have fine features. My clients simply felt that Flare’s user interface was far too “technical” and the workflows so much more cumbersome compared to RoboHelp. There was also a much steeper learning curve. Make no mistake. Flare is a fine product. But many authors feel it takes more than list of marketing buzzword features to be really useful in the long run. The workflows need to be logical and cater to technical communicators who want to spend more time helping their readers than learning some new technical way of doing things. These authors who flirted with Flare missed the ease of use they recalled when they used RoboHelp.
To make it easier for authors to return to RoboHelp from Flare, he’s created a Flare to RoboHelp project converter. You can download it from the article linked above.
I should note that I switched from WebWorks ePublisher to MadCap Flare a few years ago, after I ran into an intractable problem with WebWorks (it wouldn’t work with Word files). I found the migration from FrameMaker and WebWorks to Flare time-consuming and painful. After our first production project failed because of incompatibilities between Flare’s WebHelp and our application server, I went back to WebWorks. By that time, Quadralay had fixed the problem I was having with Word files (they spent a lot of time working with me to find the root cause, which turned out to be related to the order in which Word was loading add-ins). I’m still using FrameMaker and WebWorks and have no plans to return to Flare – I completely concur with Daigle’s comments about Flare’s interface and workflow. OTOH, I know writers who have used it successfully, so your mileage may vary.