Presented by: Paul Pehrson
Amongst other things, one thing that any Technical Writer is expected to provide is visibility of the content produced. This may take any shape or form (reports, dashboards, spreadsheets), but the key requirement is to provide some statistics around content created in any project. Madcap offers a number of products as part of the MadPak suite that allow you to track your projects and report on various parameters.
In his presentation on how to manage a Madcap Flare project, Paul showed us a few options/features he uses to keep a track of his work.
Possibly, the number one feature that Flare provides is Tags. It is possible to track file status with tags. Think of file tags as metadata for tracking files. You can learn more about file tagging here.
Some really good tips I picked up about tags from Paul’s presentation:
a. Create a File Tagset. File name and tag type are 2 different things!
b. Have 1 tag type for all different tagsets. You can assign multiple tags from 1 one window.
c. You cannot set a tag to a folder, only to the objects in the folder (images, files etc)
Another strong feature in Flare is the File List.
The File List window (accessed via View –> File List) shows all files in the project.
a. You can select types of content you want to see (html, images etc) using the Filter drop down.
b. You can customise columns in the File List window using the Show/hide columns option.
c. Most importantly, you can export this data to an external CSV file for processing.
Towards the end of the presentation, Paul quickly demonstrated another tool from Madcap: Analyzer.
Analyzer integrates with Flare and allows you to report on a number of things related to your projects. You can use Analyzer to find out broken links, missing content, unused styles or images and create custom reports to identify issues.
The key takeaway from this presentation was how to effectively use tagsets/tags to report on project status.
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