If you’re a fan of using Kanban boards – the simplest way of implementing one in MadCap Flare is to use a TOC.
Setting up a Kanban TOC in Flare
- Create a new TOC and add items corresponding to your workflow (e.g. Backlog, In Writing, etc)
- Add topics to your backlog
- Work on one topic at a time, moving it along the TOC as you progress
Voilà – you have a simple but complete overview of your topics, and you keep topic administration to a minimum.
Stuff you can do with a Kanban TOC in Flare
Creating a review package
To create a review package, just right-click, for example, the “In review” node and select Send for review:
When your reviewers open the review package, they’ll see your entire Kanban TOC, but will only be able to edit the topics in the node you chose:
Creating a review PDF
If you apply conditions to the Kanban TOC nodes, you can easily build a special review PDF if you set up the PDF target to include only the “In review” condition.
AUTOMATING reviews with batch builds and a little javascripting
To reduce the administration effort even further, you can set up a nightly webhelp batch build of e.g. the topics that are ready for review, and automatically send an e-mail to your reviewers asking for their feedback. To make it as easy as possible for them to supply comments, you can add a feedback button to your topics (for more info, see Adding a feedback button to your HTML5 output)
