LI-COR Environmental Standardizes on MadCap Flare to Deliver a Modern Technical Support Website, Embedded Help, and 150-Plus PDFs

The Big Win

LI-COR Environmental is the global leader in greenhouse gas measurements, serving scientists in more than 100 countries around the world. To help customers successfully use its 40-plus products, LI-COR has standardized on MadCap Flare to deliver an interactive technical support website, Help embedded within its software, and printed documentation, from short quick-start guides to 1000+ page instruction manuals.

• Robust Customer Empowerment: Advanced search functionality with micro content, embedded videos, and software code samples delivered via a modern website enable LI-COR’s scientific customers to readily get the answers they need and minimize demands on the support team.
• Improved Efficiency: MadCap Flare’s topic-based, single-source publishing and high-performance compilation of graphics and equations simplifies the creation and delivery of an HTML5-based support website, Help embedded in software, and a range of print and online PDF files.
• Website Brand Consistency: Modern site navigation, responsive design, and the inclusion of marketing web design elements in the MadCap Flare-based support website help it match LI-COR’s corporate website..
• Easier Collaboration: The integration of MadCap Flare with GitHub facilitates collaboration and version control among LI-COR’s technical writers. 

LI-COR Environmental is the global leader in greenhouse gas measurements. For more than 50 years, its team of scientists and engineers has provided innovative answers to global research questions with instruments and software that measure greenhouse gases and water in plants, soil, oceans, and the atmosphere. Today, LI-COR serves scientists in more than 100 countries around the world.

Complementing LI-COR’s state-of-the-art instrument systems is an organization-wide commitment to helping customers succeed through the highest levels of customer service and support. This includes interactive Help delivered via a support website and Help embedded within its software, along with a range of printed guides, manuals, and other documentation. Today, LI-COR has standardized on MadCap Flare with its topic-based authoring and single source publishing to deliver this content.

Multiple Authoring Tools for Multiple Products

LI-COR began in 1971 with its introduction of the first low-cost light sensor filtered for the waveband absorbed by plants. Since then, LI-COR Environmental has expanded to provide a multitude of solutions for measuring various biological parameters.

As the company grew, so too did its documentation, but there was no standardization. Any employee creating documents could decide what applications to use.

“By 2010, our print documentation and online Help were being produced using a mix of Microsoft Word; Quark Express; and various Adobe products, including InDesign, FrameMaker, PageMaker and RoboHelp,“ recalled Thad Miller, technical content director for LI-COR Environmental.

Despite the apps already in place, LI-COR added MadCap Flare for a new project that required the ability to produce both PDFs and web content.

“The appeal of Flare was that it could meet our long-standing need to produce long-form and short-form PDFs, as well as the rising need to produce HTML content for the web,” Miller explained. “An additional plus was the ability to bundle Flare output with software apps. But single sourcing for everything was the biggest draw.”

Meanwhile, LI-COR began to recognize that supporting its growth and ensuring a consistent, high-quality experience would require the company to standardize how its Help and documentation were created. After evaluating several Help authoring tools, LI-COR selected MadCap Flare, both for its features and its commitment to supporting future demands.

“Among other vendors we evaluated, there wasn’t a clear vision of where they were going, and it didn’t seem that they were listening to tech writing professionals. We didn’t want to choose an app that didn’t have a future,” Miller recalled. “MadCap Software presented a vision for Flare that was inspiring, and many technical writers spoke highly of it. Then, after using the trial version, it just felt like Flare developers really understood the day-to-day things we do and how to make them easier.”

Creating a Modern Technical Support Center Website

LI-COR Environmental has harnessed the comprehensive capabilities of MadCap Flare to deliver all of its documentation—from PDFs to interactive online Help available on the web and embedded in its software.

Early in the implementation, Miller also used Madcap Flare to build the entire technical support website for LI-COR’s Environmental product line (www.licor.com/env/support). The modern website takes advantage of MadCap Flare’s capabilities for HTML5, modern site navigation, and responsive design to create an intuitive web experience that automatically adjusts to any user’s mobile or computer screen size.

“Flare has brought me, a technical writer, into the world of the internet. Now I can write and produce web content without involving a web developer,” Miller notes.

Meanwhile multimedia on the support site includes screenshots from MadCap Capture, and embedded videos from video hosting services, such as YouTube.

“Capture is just a fantastic addition, and its Flare integration makes it really easy to capture screenshots,” says Miller. “We also do a lot of technical drawings for our hardware instruments, and we make a lot of these images using Capture. Even though it’s a screen capture app, it also has basic editing tools, and it’s really nice to be able to work in one environment.”

Notably, MadCap Flare’s functionality for embedding videos means the technical writers can now incorporate videos into the support website instead of relying on the LI-COR web team as they did in the past.

“With Flare, it’s now a breeze for our tech writers to include video and other multimedia content to the HTML5 output,” Miller notes. “That’s also brought a lot more visibility and better search results to the content we produce.”

Technical writers also link to PDF files and software executables that are hosted on a file sharing service, and they use analytics on the support site to evaluate site usage and record feedback from site visitors.

“We integrate a lot of external resources with our Flare HTML5 output using standard web technologies, the same way that a web developer would for a typical website,” Miller explains. “Because of its underlying XML architecture, Flare plays very nicely with the internet.”

Enhancing the Support Website’s User Experience

Since rolling out the technical support website, LI-COR has continued to enhance the user experience by taking advantage of new capabilities in MadCap Flare as they have become available.

For example, the technical writing team now uses MadCap Flare to create microcontent for the 100-plus videos linked to the support website. So, instead of just presenting text, search results offer a graphical preview of the video.

LI-COR also uses MadCap Flare to publish code snippets with syntax highlighting in its technical documentation and web support, since some of the scientists using LI-COR Environmental products want to do their own programming.

“The tools built into Flare are very useful. I especially like that we can deploy a copy button for the code snippets without writing any code ourselves,” Miller notes.

Reinforcing the Corporate Brand

To create a look that is consistent with LI-COR’s corporate website, technical writers use Server Side Includes (SSI) technology to inject elements, such as the corporate header and footer, into the MadCap Flare-based support web site for the Environmental product line.

“With Server Side Includes, we can bring components from our marketing site into our HTML5 Flare output. Since the web designers make the header and footer, they have complete control over them, and that makes our Flare Help site look seamless with our corporate website,” Miller observes. “This has enabled us to create our support site entirely from Flare.”

Additional features within MadCap Flare also help to align the support site with the corporate site, notes Miller: “We use a HTML5 top nav skin that I customize to accommodate elements we add from our marketing team, and we use a separate master page for each product.”

Beyond reinforcing the LI-COR corporate brand, the technical writing team also uses Server Side Includes to add forms that customers fill out on the Flare-created support site. These forms send data to its Marketo marketing automation software and Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“Being able to send data from Flare HTML5 output to our marketing and CRM software gives us another avenue for understanding how we can provide our customers with superior service and support,” Miller says.

Ensuring Consistency Across Content

The MadCap Flare-based support site is just one of some 150-plus targets for the Environmental product line, which currently includes more than 40 different offerings, but it now manages all 1,535 equations associated with the product offerings. The technical writers also use MadCap Flare to produce HTML5 Help content that is embedded into its applications, and PDFs for online and print. These PDFs range from manuals that can be over 1,000 pages long to installation guides, technical notes, instructional content, and quick-start guides with MadCap Flare-generated QR codes that link back to the support website.

“Doing all of our technical content in Flare has enabled us to do more than we could before, simply because everything is together, done the same way, and can be produced in the same target,” Miller observes. “We basically doubled our product portfolio and kept our technical writing staff the same size. So, Flare has effectively doubled our productivity.”

To facilitate reuse and ensure consistency across all of its product documentation, LI-COR’s technical writers rely on several features within MadCap Flare, including topic-based authoring, single-source publishing functionality, conditional text, cascading style sheet (CSS), and table of contents (TOC) files.

“Now with Flare, I just do single sourcing and re-use so automatically, and our stylesheet enables us to be much more efficient,” Miller notes.

Improving Project Efficiency and Quality

The technical writing team is also taking advantage of enhancements in MadCap Flare that have yielded significant performance improvements for equations and images based on scalable vector graphics (SVG), speeding the time to compile this content for some of LI-COR’s most substantial products.

“We make extensive use of equations, and I've been moving towards using SVG as much as possible for any line drawing,” Miller explains. “Using the most recent version of Flare has helped us cut the build time for our largest targets in half.”

Meanwhile, MadCap Flare’s integration with Git facilitates collaboration and version control. Notably, it allows the writers to work on branches, so that they can update content for one product in Flare without having it tied to the main body of content.

“The ability to use Flare and Git together has helped us in ways that I could hardly ever imagine before we started,” says Miller.

Additionally, LI-COR’s technical writers take advantage of the MadCap Analyzer functionality embedded within MadCap Flare to improve the quality of its output.

“Analyzer is a huge benefit. It will find images and files I don’t use, along with unused or unlinked files,” Miller observes. “It keeps a project clean and frees me from having to track every little file, so I can focus on writing content.”

Facilitating Translation

In developing content, the technical writing team also takes advantage of MadCap Flare to help structure content with translation in mind. Additionally, LI-COR relies on MadTranslations to localize some of its user manuals, marketing brochures (PDFs), and product labeling as needed.

“Our distributors normally handle translations for their local market, though we’ve done some localizations with MadTranslations on a case-by-case basis. Although our content is highly technical, MadTranslations has always returned high-quality translated content that doesn’t need a lot of extra attention.” Miller says.

Recently, LI-COR also took advantage of MadCap Lingo to manage an urgent translation request.

“We don’t usually translate content, but we had obtained a MadCap Lingo license with our Flare license,” Miller recalls. “So, when an unexpected translation request came across, I was able to respond pretty quickly without developing a new workflow. MadCap Lingo saved quite a bit of time.”

Enhanced Support Experience

From a business perspective, LI-COR wants to support customers by making it as fast and easy as possible for them to find the answers they need. However, in the old technical support site for Environmental products, users basically had to search several PDFs. And even if those users could find the right PDF file, they still had to find an answer that might be located in the middle of a very large PDF document. By contrast, the HTML5 support website built with MadCap Flare enables users to quickly find answers to their questions.

“We’ve gotten feedback from customers that they’re really pleased with the speed and accuracy of the search results in our Flare-based support website. It’s a night-and-day difference between our old online support and our new Flare-based support site,” Miller explains. “And because we allow our customers to self-service, our tech support team can focus on higher priority cases. It has helped our tech support team to stay lean.”

Miller adds, “What we’re doing with Flare today vastly exceeds what I imagined we’d be doing when we first adopted it. It’s been a delight that we keep being able to do more with each Flare release, and I intend to keep using Flare for a long time.”