As the year comes to an end, we’d like to take a look back at some of our favorite moments and milestones that took place in 2019. Between new business growth, financial highlights, office expansions, multiple industry-first innovations, two worldwide user conferences namely, MadWorld San Diego and MadWorld Dublin, plus being named one of the Top Workplaces in 2019, we would like to thank all our loyal customers and we look forward to supporting all of you in 2020 and beyond.

Well, we have a lot to cover, so, let’s jump right in!

Financial Highlights

To start us off, financial highlights include total new business is up more than 20% YTD for 2019. That growth has been fueled by over 150% YOY growth of our cloud solution MadCap Central and adoption of MadCap Authoring and Management System (AMS), launched in the first quarter of 2019.

Strong sales from North America and Europe, as well as the Asia-Pacific region, have contributed to the company’s overall strong financial performance. Major product releases, which we’ll get to shortly, have continued to push the envelope with groundbreaking new features keeping our customers ahead of the industry and providing cutting edge authoring and publishing efficiency.

Austin Office Expansion

In January, MadCap Software officially opened the Austin, TX office to better support its rapidly growing customer base worldwide. The move allowed an increase in pre and post-sales support for customers across Europe, eastern Canada, and the central and eastern regions in the United States, who represent nearly 70% of MadCap Software’s customer base.

“We recognize that our success is directly linked to the success of customers using our products to deliver the state-of-the-art content that is critical to their businesses. And because great customer support is just as important as great software, we have made extensive investments in building both cutting-edge solutions and extremely knowledgeable sales and technical support teams to give users the tools and expertise they need to succeed,” said Anthony Olivier, MadCap founder, and CEO. “The addition of our Austin office builds on this commitment and our reputation for having the best support in the industry. Together our Austin and San Diego teams will enable us to more effectively serve customers around the world using our products as we continue raising the bar on quality service, support, and technology.”

Major Product Releases

In February, we announced the MadCap Authoring and Management System (AMS), which for the first time allowed users to purchase everything they needed in a single license subscription solution.

Included in MadCap AMS:

  • MadCap Flare offering cutting-edge technical authoring and publishing capabilities with advanced features to maximize authoring efficiency, content reuse, documentation quality, and multi-channel publishing system.
  • MadCap Central the first cloud-based platform for content and project management designed specifically for the documentation industry; cloud-based editing and review makes content collaboration streamlined and efficient.
  • MadCap Mimic providing professional video editing for eLearning tools, tutorials, software simulations and more.
  • MadCap Capture offering advanced screen capture and image editing for web, print and mobile content.
  • MadCap Lingo providing advanced translation management for technical authors, translators, and documentation teams.
  • MadCap Connect for Salesforce providing publishing capabilities directly to Salesforce Knowledge.
  • MadCap Connect for Zendesk proving publishing capabilities directly to Zendesk.
  • And lastly, platinum-level Maintenance and Support including unlimited telephone and email support plus expanded support hours.

“MadCap Central’s seamless integration with Flare helps multiple people to share and manage changes to files in a central location,” says Kate Doherty, simPRO Learning and Development (L&D) team lead and senior instructional designer. “As a result, team communication and content quality have greatly improved.”

Next, we had two major releases of Flare in 2019. The release of MadCap Flare 2019 and 2019 r2 added several industry firsts, including the patent-pending micro content authoring feature, allowing authors to move beyond just topic-based authoring; drag-and-drop import of multiple file types including Microsoft Word and the ability to have responsive and personalized content which automatically change based on the user device.

Patent Pending Micro Content Authoring – is an industry-first built-in Micro Content Editor that gives users the ability to reuse and publish content in new engaging ways. One of the easiest applications of micro content is as custom featured snippets in search results. When users search for a term or phrase, a featured snippet of text and images appears above regular search results, providing targeted information that’s highly relevant to the query. Other applications of micro content include content authoring for chatbots, augmented and virtual reality, FAQ databases, field-level Help and more.

CSS Variables – also known as custom properties are available with styles to enhance single-sourcing capabilities. Place the value for a style in one place and reuse it on as many elements as needed throughout a stylesheet.

Updated Project Library and Templates – have been streamlined with new designs and CSS variables to make it easy to customize style sheets. In addition, users can also easily access our gallery of responsive templates from the library.

Redesigned Import Wizard for Microsoft® Word & Drag and Drop Import of Multiple File Types – a completely updated wizard saves time and gives users more control when importing files, making it easy to drag and drop different file types into the Content Explorer and quickly convert Word content into Flare topics.

Responsive Content Personalization – Flare has always offered output that is responsive to the device being used. This includes the skin that wraps around content and the layout of the information on the page. This industry-first feature takes it a step further by now also making it easy to dynamically change the content itself (including text and multi-media) based on device or user type, all from a single target, without having to understand code or complex CSS.

For a full breakdown of all the Flare features added in 2019, watch our 75-minute webinar with Jennifer Morse, Director of Product Evangelism, and Jorgeo Catolico, Sales.

Several releases to MadCap Central throughout the year added a completely redesigned user interface and major workflow enhancements.

Redesigned User Interface – the user interface for MadCap Central has been completely redesigned for a new modern look and feel. Functionality enhancements, workflow improvements, an expanded customizable dashboard, and more, all provide added control and an improved user experience.

Enhancements to Projects, Tasks, and Widgets – include easy access to projects using a drop-down in the upper-left corner of the interface, more layout flexibility with tasks, easily filter through reports using widgets, and more.

Streamlined “Send-for-Translation” Workflow – easily bundle and send projects and files for a translation estimate directly through MadCap Central. Simply select the project or file to be translated and a quote request will be generated.

Output Analytics – In the MadCap Central October 2019 release, you can now get instant measurable business insights on how effective your content is, and how it needs to evolve based on usage and demand.

The best part? It’s so easy! No need to manage complex tracking code, no need to install any server-side software, it is all available in Central. Your project doesn’t even have to be bound in Central, or hosted there, which makes this really flexible. In addition, you can gather metrics on as many different targets or projects you want, with your Central subscription.

You can instantly gather metrics on your HTML5 outputs including search terms used, topic hits, searches that don’t return results, and more.  When you have actionable insights like this, you will immediately see improvements in operating costs, incident/request resolution, customer satisfaction, and a significant reduction in training times.

MadCap Contributor 9 also saw major new updates for streamlined contribution and review and MadCap Lingo 11 for translation management.

MadWorld Conferences in San Diego, California and Dublin, Ireland

We were thrilled to host two major conferences this year in two outstanding venues and cities. With hundreds of users coming from all over the world, the conferences were a showcase for best practices, workshops, and networking events. A full recap for each conference can be found here: MadWorld 2019 San Diego Recap and MadWorld 2019 Dublin Recap.

Our next MadWorld conference takes place naturally in Austin, Texas -- our new second home -- on September 20- 23, 2020 at the brand new Fairmont Austin hotel. Full conference details can be found here.

Top Workplace Award for Third Consecutive Year

For the third consecutive year, we were thrilled to be named a Top Workplace by The San Diego Union-Tribune. The Top Workplaces 2019 list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a third-party survey administered by research partner Energage, LLC, a leading provider of technology-based employee engagement tools. The anonymous survey measures several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, just to name a few.

“The Top Workplaces award is about much more than recognition and celebration,” said Eric Rubino, CEO of Energage. “Our research also shows that these organizations achieve higher referral rates, lower employee turnover, and double the employee engagement levels. It just goes to show that being intentional about culture delivers bottom-line results.”

“Since founding MadCap Software 14 years ago here in San Diego, we have put a priority on attracting and empowering a team of dedicated professionals, who have been central to not only our innovation in redefining how content developers produce content but also our success in expanding our global footprint,” said Anthony Olivier, MadCap Software founder and CEO. “We are honored to be named one of the Top Workplaces in San Diego for the third consecutive year. It’s a strong testament to our mission of building a passionate and talented workforce, which has enabled us to achieve an intensely loyal customer base and rapid adoption of our solutions worldwide.”

Case Studies

Finally, each year, MadCap Software interviews and develops a handful of select customer case studies. We love learning about our customers as well as sharing how leading organizations around the globe are cutting costs, increasing productivity, and streamlining the process of developing and delivering training content, learning & development programs, technical documentation, and more.

Here's a list of our latest success stories from 2019:

  • Zylinc - unified communications software company delivers self-support website, employee training and onboarding, and product documentation—all using MadCap Flare
  • Cloudistics - replaces Microsoft® Word, chooses MadCap Flare over Atlassian Confluence® to deliver modern, streamlined self-support documentation portal to customers
  • SimCorp - global investment management solutions provider uses MadCap Flare to ensure its user documentation is ready for agile development and the cloud
  • LI-COR - biosciences standardizes on MadCap Flare to deliver a modern technical support site, embedded help, and nearly 150 PDFs
  • simPRO - field service and job management software provider delivers modern help website using MadCap Flare and MadCap Central for authoring, content management, and publishing
  • Fred IT Group - Australia’s largest pharmacy IT solutions provider creates integrated online help and customized eLearning training courses using MadCap Flare
  • IDeaS - IDeaS Revenue Management Solutions Partners with MadTranslations for Localization in Six Languages for 124 Countries
  • TotalTrax - delivers fleet tracking solutions and documentation for warehouse, industrial, and manufacturing environments in multiple languages with MadTranslations
  • Sisense - the industry leader in business intelligence for complex data, uses MadCap Flare to seamlessly deliver HTML5-based help and documentation supporting multiple product versions
  • disguise - visual production innovator delivers state-of-the-art user experience via responsive, modern help website using MadCap Flare

To Sum Up 2019

To sum up 2019, it has been a tremendous year for growth, for new product launches, and to better support our customers across the globe. We’d like to thank each and every one of our customers for their support throughout the years. As this year comes to an end, we are thrilled to see what 2020 has in store for us!