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I also don't know about the cross-browser issues. I haven't been doing any
production work in Flare 8 yet, just testing. That is something I'll be
looking into shortly. I'll post about it on my blog when I do.
I had no trouble having Flare 7 and Flare 8 installed concurrently.
However, I have a vague recollection that MadCap warned me against trying
to open a Flare 8 project in Flare 7. Unsurprisingly, projects created in 8
aren't backwards compatible. If you use any of 8's new features (like
sub-folders in the Project Organizer), Flare 7 will have no idea what's
going on, and you're going to have all kinds of problems. If you're working
in something like SVN, I'd branch your Flare project and create a version
for Flare 8 so that you can investigate the new features, but keep the
Flare 7 branch (or trunk, depending on how you set it up) to protect your
version 7 project in case you need to go back to it for any reason.
Kevin covered how you can keep the menu version of Flare if the ribbon
annoys you. I personally find it helpful; while I don't
have empirical evidence, I believe I have fewer mouse clicks with the
Ribbon interface, compared to the menu interface, but it's an issue
that--what--four years after being introduced still causes heated
discussions. I think it is pretty cool that with Flare you can pick your
poison.
I don't think that there is a timeout function on the floating license, and
I can see how hoarding might be a problem, both for Contributor and Flare.
I am not aware of a way to see who is currently running the system. I don't
know what happens when, in your example, person 11 tries to access the
system, but my guess is that you WONT see a list of computers/people who
are hogging one of the ten available licenses. This would probably be a
good feature request.
Do remember, however, that in Review mode, any number of people in your
organization can have Contributor installed and they can make annotations
to Flare project reviews. That is free functionality available to anybody
who downloads Contributor. You only run into floating license issues if you
are allowing people to author content for (or contribute content to) a
Flare project, as this is the type of functionality that requires a
license. If all your people are reviewers just making annotations, you
don't have any kind of licensing issues.
Somebody else asked if the search engine has been replaced in Flare v8, and
I don't know the answer to that.
Hope this helps.
-Paul
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Paul Pehrson
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