In the early 2000s, MadCap Software took the online help industry by storm with their flagship Flare product. With the attention to detail in the product interface and the completely portable XHTML files, which allowed non-Flare users to open a file and fix a typo, the product was an instant winner.

MadCap didn’t sit on its laurels with the launch of Flare, despite the capture of 25 percent of the online help market by end of 2007. What they lacked in corporate size, they made up in development enthusiasm. Madcap followed its release of Flare with a complement of tools that a technical communicator needed to create a complete online help project. The lynch pin for the suite, called MadPak, was the interoperability factor. All the tools worked seamlessly together, to create an experience unlike any the industry had seen until then one, where technical communicators didn’t need to hold their breath while importing, converting, or compiling...just in case.

MadCap continues to build out its suite of productivity-enhancing software. Hard on the heels of Analyzer, the beta of Blaze has been released.

• MadCap’s Sharon Burton talks about how Analyzer speeds authoring by letting authors analyze projects for problems like broken links
• Sign up for a Blaze demo (think the simplicity of Word authoring with the power of XML structuring - for an under-the-hood look