Re: It Stinks

[Sarah Stegall <stegall@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

B. Mark Hilton wrote:
> 
> Framers,
> 
> Forgive me, but I had no idea that these groups had such conspiracy minded
> participants.

You're forgiven. 

My post re: Macworld reflected my own experience. 
It's not an attempt at rumor mongering, and
certainly not an attempt to sabotage Adobe.  I am
a big fan of Frame, and would do just about
anything to pull our company out from under the
Microsoft megalith.  But I must be honest about
the difficulties we've had with Adobe's response,
or lack of it, regarding FrameMaker.  When I was
hired here, my manager told me that she had had a
devil of a time just *ordering* FrameMaker.  She's
a big fan of the product, and wants to move all
our publishing onto Frame and away from Word. 
We're both committed to the idea.  But it's hard
to stay committed when it takes literally months
to get a simple order for one copy of Frame
fulfilled, when Adobe simply does not answer phone
calls, and when there are very few third-party
solutions out there (like  "Framemaker for
Dummies") to help us when we get stuck. Management
takes a dim view of software which costs nearly
three times what Word does, does not support
Visio, requires us to PAY for an upgrade so we can
import Word files, and lacks strong customer phone
support (although this doesn't keep them from
buying Microsoft products).

> I gladly listen to any constructive comments on improving the product,
> suggestions on improving the marketing of the product, and the raising of
> concerns by the user community. 

Okay.  Please support Visio technical drawing
formats.  They are the de facto standard in the
telecommunications and networking industry for
drawing technical illustrations and flowcharts. I
have tried to get engineering departments to buy
Illustrator for their tech illustrations, and find
great resistance.  EVERY TECHNOLOGY FIRM I HAVE
WORKED FOR OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS USES VISIO.
Period. If you guys don't support this
network/drawing program and its associated drawing
files, you're going to start losing Engineering
departments wholesale. How hard could it be to
write a filter for a Visio vector drawing image?

Also, you need to support AutoCAD drawings
better--often a schematic or a diagram will be
plucked out of a CAD drawing for an illustration
in a technical manual.  What I do NOT find
happening is engineers drawing illustrations or
diagrams in Frame.  They don't use Frame, by and
large.

However, all this constant resurrecting of
> rumors of FrameMaker's demise only serves to fuel more concerns with
> potential new users and slows FrameMaker developers from developing software
> for your consumption.  As you can guess this does not help the growth of the
> FrameMaker customer base.  Just in case you weren't clear on this point, its
> the growth of the FrameMaker customer base that fuels investment in the
> product.

Well, we just bought Frame last year and plan to
buy more licenses, but only as long as management
is convinced that this product will be supported. 
Certainly we don't want to invest heavily in
buying and training for Frame, only to find the
rug jerked out from under us if Adobe fails to
support it. It's a chicken-and-egg thing.  I'm
only alerting you to the fact that there's a trust
problem with Adobe right now. It may not be your
fault, and it's unfortunate, but there it is.

As long as we're talking customer support,
however, I'd like to end on an upbeat note.  I
have found the Adobe User Forum on FrameMaker to
be very useful, not only for answering my own
questions about the product but for alerting me to
solutions I had not thought of, features I did not
normally use, and techniques that had not occurred
to me.  Your experts in that forum have been first
rate.  It's a great example of tech support, which
I have brought to my own manager's attention
(we're officially in Tech Support ourselves) as a
model for our own website. Your own presence here,
reading this forum, is a very good sign as well:
as long as you're listening to us here, I can
forget what happened at MacWorld. Finally, I'd
like put in a word of appreciation for Adobe's
continuing to support not only Windows and Mac
users, but UNIX users as well.  At a software
development house I worked at, Frame was the only
program we had in common--even our email programs
were different--and my communication with UNIX
programmers on tech pubs issues was unhindered by
document format incompatibilities.  

I sincerely hope Adobe reconsiders its decision to
drop a FrameMaker forum from Adobe magazine.

-- 
Sarah Stegall                 ||  Senior Technical
Writer  
Terayon Communication Systems || 
stegall@terayon.com
2952 Bunker Hill Lane         ||  voice
408-919-5893
Santa Clara, CA 95054         ||  fax 408-727-6204


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