Reposting this to the frame list serve for people who aren't on HATT. =================================================== Hi Jeremy,
Let me say at the outset that I really like Adobe products. I think FrameMaker and Robohelp are good products and that they serve most technical writer's needs at this point in time. That being said I couldn't agree more as a current Adobe customer and user of TCS2. While Adobe FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8 qualify as "good enough", are they best in class? I knew that used to be true, but now I am not sure anymore..... First, let's consider their official customer service: its simply horrendous. Not only are you required to wait at least 20 to 30 minutes simply to speak to a human being, but once you find a person that individual inevitably tells you "that you are in the wrong queue"....which means waiting yet another 15 minutes on hold. I recall a time when I was placed on hold for over four hours, switched around to multiple queues, to finally find out that my six months of complimentary customer service had expired and I would have to purchase tech support. I don't think anything should be free, its perfectly legitimate to charge for customer service, but you couldn't tell me that within the first hour? Admittedly, as long as FrameMaker and Robohelp are stable and non-buggy (which they are for the most part), its not a problem. But god help you, if something goes horribly wrong. Last week, after a year without problems, FrameMaker 9 suddenly started crashing at start up. I was dead in the water. What to do? I pinged various list serves, I checked adobe's support forum, rebooted my system, system restore, and reinstalled FrameMaker. I couldn't find anything on my problem. After a day of searching I ended up reformatting my computer. I found out 2 days later from someone (with an adobe address no less !!), that I could fix my problem by deleting the adobe files in my application data folder. I might have been able to avoid reformatting altogether. I think this clearly illustrates that customer support is not a priority to Adobe. I understand why. Customer service is a gigantic cost and it hurts the bottom line. It just seems like they haven't considered how their current customers would view that nor how that would affect customer retention. Because I assure you, if I ever end up in a situation where we are transferring over to new software -- customer support will be a big concern for me. But set aside customer support -- what about the products themselves? I think FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8 were really great improvements over the previous versions. And yet they seem really rough around the edges. There are little things about the product that clearly just fell through the cracks. For example, if you are a power user of framemaker then you use hot keys all the time, especially for paragraph tags and variables. However, randomly and without warning, they'll just stop working. You either have to resize the window or restart Framemaker. Its absolutely maddening. In any case, I keep coming back to FrameMaker's future and how it just doesn't seem like Adobe gets it. The future of technical documentation is XML authoring. While there's structured framemaker, dita, and a host of third party plugins can anyone really say its a simple, painless, and quick process to transition from unstructured framemaker to either structured or dita? I doubt it -- though of course if I am wrong someone please correct me because I would love to transition to a pure XML solution (but not DITA). If FrameMaker provided a robust, simple, intuitive UI wizard that could walk someone through the process of converting their unstructured documentation into some sort of generic XML structure, it would be worth their weight in gold. And then if they provided not only robust XSLT support to transform the content into a help system and a PDF but a simple intuitive way to create use XSLT stylesheets....well that would be amazing. I know there are products out there that do this already. The only reason I haven't gone over to them is product lock in. One of these days, the product lock in is going to cease being a factor and i'll end up dropping framemaker for a true XML authoring environment. I wonder if Adobe realizes this? Sincerely, Joseph Lorenzini
