MadCap Software, a renewing Gold-level TECHWR-L Sponsor, provides an integrated suite of tools for content authoring, single-sourcing, and multi-channel publishing. As a Gold sponsor, MadCap Software is instrumental in providing you with TECHWR-L.

MadCap Software, headquartered in San Diego, CA, and including the former developers of RoboHelp, is just a new name for a group of familiar faces that have been leading the technical writing community for over a decade.

The MadCap team leverages years of experience in the content
authoring and publishing industries to focus on providing a full
work-flow solution - not just a collection of tools. From the reuse of your legacy content in various formats, to the creation of new content, to the use of modern media assets, to a powerful publishing system, MadCap Software provides end-to-end content development, delivery and management tools to support those needs.

MadCap Software has developed the only documentation architecture that treats all documentation processes-authoring and publishing of text and multimedia, collaboration, analysis, and translation and localization-as a single workflow. It is the only documentation suite that is based on a native XML architecture. As a result, the reusability and integration associated with leading-edge software development has been translated
into first-of-its-kind reusability and integration in documentation. It is this architecture that allows MadCap's software to support the single-source, multi-channel content publishing needs of today's documentation professionals, who must communicate across the Internet, private intranets, CDs, and print and more-in readers' languages of choice.

Already thousands of companies are customers of MadCap's native XML software.

Sponsors like Madcap Software provide the support that keeps TECHWR-L going, and we greatly appreciate them! Please support them in any way that you can.

Apex CoVantage (www.apexcovantage.com) is pleased to invite you
to attend a FREE live webinar "Controlling Help-Specific Features
in WebWorks" on Thursday, January 31st at 11 am EST; 8:00 am PST.

To be truly productive, authors need to be able to select
help-specific features independent of the formatting applied to the text. This webinar will demonstrate techniques Apex has developed to accomplish this. Attendees will walk away with a sample WebWorks project, sample FrameMaker template, and a sample EDD.

During my research on HATS for beginners like me, I found these great resources:

List of available HATs for help authors who use MS Word at:
http://www.mshelpwiki.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=AvailableTools

List of reviews on many of these HATS:
http://www.mshelpwiki.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=SoftwareReviews

I’ve also gotten good insight by emailing authors of software reviews. Many have responded within days and have been helpful.

Mostly however, I’ve found that trying the application is the best way to determine if it’s right for my projects and purposes.