Save Yourself $700 and a Headache | Is MadCap Flare Now Leading Adobe RoboHelp In HAT War?

How much money do you need to pay to make quality PDFs? According to Tom Johnson, the I’d Rather Be Writing author, zero.

Free PDF Generation

Tom opens by talking about that irritating little release updater that Adobe runs in the background. Speaking about PDF functionality that exists in Word 2007 Tom states:

…you can download the Save as PDF or XPS add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 for free. It’s less than 1 megabyte to download, and it quickly and flawlessly converts Word docs to PDF, even with hyperlinks. If you have non-Word documents to convert, Primo PDF (another free PDF alternative) will do it absolutely free.

I keep wondering why Microsoft wasn’t able to package this add-in with their updates, or initially with the product.

After reading my PDF summary from January you’ll know my position on this necessary but often overused documentation format. Yes, I use it. Yes, it is a standard. But not worth $700 if you don’t have to spend it.

Help Authoring Tool War - Now Led By MadCap?

What brought me to the IRBW site this evening was the poll that Sharon mentioned. Surfing over to IRBW I checked it out - here’s the Authoring Tool voting stats listed as of today.

I’m not surprised. This is what happens when you lose confidence in the software manufacturer who takes over a popular product such as RoboHelp and loses touch with the market.

Adobe, Adobe… Is AIR going to ‘Help’ you?

AIR seems to get some traction for ADBE however. The stock is still trading near 52-week high levels and has been climbing since it’s low around March of this year.

I’ll have to do a follow-up to my 2007 prediction of stock value for Adobe (NASD: ADBE) dropping this year. After all, Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) isn’t releasing Vista and ADBE’s forced upgrade tactic isn’t as relevant.

We’ll have to see how things go at the end of the fiscal year… They could prove me wrong.

Am I First to Coin The Term AIRHelp?

Then again, last month Ben Minson’s two part review of the RoboHelp Packager for AIR public beta raised some solid questions about the functionality of the software for the end user.

I’m not sold on .air taking over the world of WWW just yet. I agree with most of this take from Ben Minson on ADBE AIR:

Adobe seems to be following a good line of thinking here with AIR help. But remember, users want simplicity. Having to install each help system as an application is asking too much of everyday users.

This use case for AIRHelp would tend to put us back to the .chm days with a distributable file that needed to be on every system running it. eHelp introduced WebHelp as a way to get away from that back in 2002. 

ADBE’s RoboHelp… Innovative A Year Too Late To Be Innovative

Doing something like Web 2.0 two release cycles behind your competition is not innovative. It’s keeping up with the market that’s trying to leave you behind. AuthorIT and MadCap Flare been-there and done-that already.

I reviewed MadCap’s Web 2.0 functionality last year as the Feedback Service. It doesn’t require installation on the client side of anything special and works cross-platform. It’s been pointed out that it can run on any IIS server on your network, even your desktop in your office.

From MadCap Mike’s Musings - Comparing Documentation Server Software - MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server:

Web 2.0 - The MadCap Feedback Server support for Web 2.0 community technologies is a complete turnkey system. Once installed there is nothing that your developers or programmers need to do to make this work. All that is required is for you to select the appropriate options while publishing your Flare projects to turn these capabilities on.

In contrast, the few similar options that Adobe has introduced are limited to the Air output only (not available in the more popular WebHelp) and even then require either programmer/developer hours or Rube Goldberg-esque scenarios where data files have to be emailed back and forth between users.

Ben’s review points out the obvious flaw; why make end users download and install something special rather than transparently do the Web 2.0 on the server side? Additionally, having an attachment-based data output for the actual server doesn’t make much sense either.

Related Posts:

• Friday Comments Review: RoboHelp vs. Flare
• Ten Faces of Innovation
• Technical Communication – Teamwork and Workflow as a Disruptive Technology
• PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
• RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic
• Adobe & MadCap’s Cold War: Market Share
• Web 2.0 - MadCap Feedback Review Part 2
• Web 2.0 - MadCap Feedback is the KISS principle at work…
• Comparing Documentation Server Software - MadCap Feedback Server and RoboHelp Server