AUSTIN, Texas & LA JOLLA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BigLever Software, the leading provider of product line engineering (PLE) solutions, and MadCap Software, the leading technical communication software provider, announced today that the companies have partnered to integrate MadCap Flare with BigLever’s Gears PLE solution. The new bridge integration optimizes document sharing and dramatically simplifies the complexity of documentation management for organizations that develop and deliver complex product lines. As a result, organizations can streamline technical communications throughout product engineering and business operations to achieve new levels of efficiency.
Organizations that build complex product lines inherently have large sets of documentation that play a vital role in the creation, delivery and maintenance of their product lines, as well as in the use of their products by end users. These companies must effectively manage a broad array of technical specifications and all of the diversity needed to support the different “flavors” of products within a product line family. The new bridge integration solution combines the capabilities of MadCap Flare and BigLever Gears to provide a single, unified mechanism for end-to-end document management across each stage of the product engineering lifecycle, and throughout business operations such as portfolio planning and definition, marketing, sales, manufacturing, deployment, service, and finely tailored documentation for end users.
“The BigLever/MadCap partnership is not only beneficial to their mutual customers, but also offers an interesting opportunity for companies needing to automate similar complex interactions and tasks,” said Allan Behrens, Managing Director of leading technology consulting firm Taxal. "This type of product line approach to engineering and documentation should bring significant business value to their customers by enabling them to more effectively automate product variation across a broader set of operational processes and applications."
According to Dr. Charles Krueger, BigLever Software CEO, the Flare/Gears Bridge allows companies to establish well-structured and consolidated document “supersets” that support the full diversity of documents in a product line. These document supersets can be automatically configured based on the specific features of the individual products within the product line. “The Flare/Gears Bridge addresses a long-underserved strategic challenge of product line organizations. Even organizations that have transitioned to mature PLE practices continue to struggle with the complexity of managing their document variants based on conventional word processing tools. The synergy that arises from the Flare/Gears integration is strikingly greater than the sum of the parts,” said Krueger.
“In an era of continuous improvement, shrinking product cycles, and multiple product variations, businesses need to ensure that their documentation keeps pace with each new rollout,” said Anthony Olivier, MadCap Software founder and CEO. “Now organizations have an integrated solution to this challenge with Flare/Gears Bridge, which synchronizes BigLever’s industry-leading Gears PLE Lifecycle Framework with MadCap Flare’s best-in-class technical authoring and publishing software. Using MadCap Flare, BigLever customers can take advantage of topic-based authoring to speed content creation and promote reuse, along with multi-channel publishing to streamline the delivery of content to where customers will use it—whether in print or on their desktops, Web browsers, or mobile devices.”
About the MadCap Flare/BigLever Gears Bridge
With BigLever’s Gears PLE Lifecycle Framework, companies can establish an automated, feature-based production system – much like a manufacturing factory – that uses product feature profiles to assemble and configure engineering assets from across the lifecycle to produce all the products in a product line. MadCap Flare allows technical communicators and content developers to efficiently author and maximize content reuse for delivery in any format including print, online, desktop, mobile, and completely responsive HTML5.
The Flare/Gears Bridge brings the benefits of these two solutions together by extending Flare and enabling it to work seamlessly with the Gears Framework. Built on the PLE Bridge API, the integration solution makes Flare "product line aware," ensuring consistent PLE capabilities and enabling the execution of PLE operations from within Flare menus.
About MadCap Software
MadCap Software, Inc. is a trusted resource for the thousands of companies around the globe that rely on its solutions for single-source multi-channel authoring and publishing, multimedia, and translation management. Whether delivering technical, policy, medical, marketing, business, or human resources content, MadCap’s products are used to create corporate intranets, Help systems, policy and procedure manuals, video tutorials, knowledge bases, eBooks, user guides, and more to any format, including high-end print, online, desktop or mobile. MadCap services include product training, consulting services, translation and localization, and an advanced developer certification program. Headquartered in La Jolla, California, MadCap Software is home to some of the most experienced software architects and product experts in the content development industry. Learn more about MadCap Software at www.madcapsoftware.com.
About BigLever Software
BigLever Software, Inc., the leading provider of systems and software product line engineering solutions and services, dramatically simplifies the creation, evolution, maintenance and delivery of a product line – a portfolio of similar products or systems with variations in features and functions. BigLever’s patented Gears solution enables organizations to reduce development costs and bring new product line features and products to market faster, enabling businesses to more reliably target and hit strategic market windows. BigLever is based in Austin, Texas. For more information, visit www.biglever.com.
BigLever Software Gears, and Gears Product Line Engineering Lifecycle Framework are trademarks of BigLever Software, Inc. MadCap Software, the MadCap Software logo and MadCap Flare are trademarks or registered trademarks of MadCap Software, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries.
