Influencing Adobe on FrameMaker

[HALL Bill <bill.hall@xxxxxxxxx>]

Re Rachel Bowen's comment as to why all the agony about fears of the "death
of Frame", this is quite understandable when your livelihood depends on
maintaining mastery of a single proprietary application. The problem is that
Adobe is a bit like Microsoft - they are interested in making big profits
wherever they can - not in yours or my livelihood. The problem is inherent
in tying yourselves to ANY proprietary product.

I subscribe to the FM users groups because my company is currently using 5
FM+SGML licenses. However, we are not concerned with whether or not Adobe
continues to support the product. SGML is a non-proprietary standard format,
and we have already verified that our data management system and authors are
equally happy to work with ArborText's Adept/Epic Editor or SoftQuad's
XMetaL. You don't even need to use the same brand of systems for formatting
and delivery as you do for authoring. Whatever tools we use for authoring,
we will probably continue to use our existing FM+SGML for the printed page -
until something better comes along.

The bottom line is that if you produce large volumes of standardised
documents (as most tech writers and tech doc companies or departments do)
you should probably be working towards standardising on doing your work as
SGML or XML. Yes, there is a cost to design DTDs and convert data, but we
have found this is valuable exercise in its own right because we have a much
better understanding of how our documents should be structured logically,
and have consequently improved the quality of our products.  

Once your data is in a standard markup format, you are substantially
protected from the vagaries of application providers.  The application
becomes a commodity like a PC. You go with whoever is offering the best deal
at the time. If one supplier ceases to support their product it is actually
quite easy to shift to another. No more application holy wars!

Where FrameMaker is concerned, we will continue to maintain our existing
licenses, but at this particular point in time, if we need to add authoring
stations beyond the existing five, we would probably go with Epic or XMetaL,
with no problems running these in parallel with the existing FM+SGML
stations. Tomorrow, it might be some product that we haven't seen yet.

The bottom line is that SGML and XML standards will sooner or later bring
real competition back into the marketplace for knowledge capture systems.
The big loser will be Microsoft, because once XML becomes the primary medium
for exchanging information electronically (rather than MS Word and paper
documents) they will have to compete on an equal footing with everyone else.

Adobe is also at risk from this revolution. As more people standardise on
markup languages, and browsers understand these better, there will be less
call for paper-oriented applications like Acrobat and Adobe's DTP tools.
.PDF is a very bad format for the dynamic production and speedy display of
information (and is virtually unreadable on many Web sites) and is useless
for content management. It will be a long time before we are totally
paperless, but I would start thinking about selling your shares in paper
manufacturers and printers. This should also concern Adobe, and perhaps
encourage them to put more effort into supporting FM as their SGML/XML
flagship. FrameMaker is a very good bridging tool between the paper and
content oriented authoring paradigms, and if Adobe exploited this
effectively, they could benefit at Microsoft's expense, but again - if they
don't, there is no need for loyalty to either Microsoft or Adobe if you have
already made the shift to structured authoring yourselves.

And yes, once you have moved your content to a standard markup format, you
can concentrate on writing documents and forget about whether or not a
particular application is properly supported.

Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Specialist
Integrated Logistic Support
Naval Projects and Support
Tenix Defence Systems Pty Ltd
Williamstown, Vic. 3016 AUSTRALIA
Email: bill.hall@tenix.com


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