****Vendor Post**** I've been at WritersUA and away from my personal email since Sunday. I got back late last night. I'm the product manager for Blaze. (BTW - great conference!)
Some clarifications: Blaze is the younger sister of Flare 4. If you need complex print and online docs, then you want Flare 4. If you only need printed output, then you want Blaze. Everything that's in Blaze will be in Flare 4. Blaze is a fully featured print authoring and publishing system. It imports and exports Frame and Word because you may have a workflow that requires you to import from or export to these formats for some reason. We want to account for that. However, you don't *need* to export to Frame to get your output if your workflow doesn't require that. You can import existing Word or Frame documents and you're good to go. Then you can directly create PDFs or XPSs as your deliverables, with the content for those deliverables based on your Outlines. Our page design and layout in Blaze is robust so there's no need to export to Frame if your workflow doesn't require Frame as an output. One of the biggest differences in Blaze - and really, Flare - is that you are not authoring long documents, but rather you're authoring topics. Then, using Outlines, you put together the topics into the deliverables; for example, a User's Guide and an Admin Guide. There's nothing to prevent you from authoring just like you do in Word of Frame in that you can open a new topic in Blaze and then write a 200 page document in one topic. But by doing that, you lose the power of topic-based content development that easily allows content reuse across multiple deliverables for one or more projects. I strongly urge you to attend one of my online demos to learn more about the paradigm shift for Blaze. If you are not aware of the shift and just click Next in the import wizard, you are going to wind up with a mess. I go over that in the demos. (Don't try to signup for a few hours, as all the scheduled demos for the next 6 weeks are full and I have to schedule more. Give me until about 9am Pacific today, please.) As to our newly announced product Press, it's for glossy print materials, like Annual reports or other glossy printed material. It's related to our other products, but it's not the only press solution. As to DITA or CMS, check out our just announced product Team Server. It's a workflow management tool that's amazing. We have ideas about what it should do but we want your input about what you need that tool to do. I'm delighted to answer questions about Blaze or any of our products. If you could send those questions to my MadCap email, that would help me a lot. [EMAIL PROTECTED], please. sharon Sharon Burton MadCap Software Product Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://madcapsoftware.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.