RE: Conversion of Word documents to structured frame documents

[Kevin McLauchlan <KMcLauchlan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

That sounded like a "whoops" to me...

Mr. Finger said:

	****[snip]****
	Arguing about whether Microsoft will take over the world because
FM+SGML
	and Word can't cleanly round trip is like arguing how many camels
can be
	taught to ride bicycles -- fascinating but pointless.  Does Dan
seriously
	contend that Ericssons (100 000 employees), HP (96 000 employees),
Boeing
	and other civilian and military manufacturers everywhere, the
Australian
	Defence Forces and other militias everywhere, the Australian Federal
	Parliament and national legislatures everywhere, Melbourne
University (35
	000 undergraduates) and other universities everywhere (are you
getting my
	drift by now), are going to dump FM+SGML for Word?
	****[snip]****


I worked for Ericsson in Montreal from 1991 'til August '98.
We were a Word house (having changed from - mostly - 
WordPerfect, in order to mollify Ericsson in Dallas).

When I started, the vast majority of developers used SUN 
stations, but before I left, the change was well on, to switch to 
a mostly NT shop in Montreal, Toronto, Richardson (Dallas), others.

We constantly swapped docs among the several thousand 
employees in Canada, the ten(s of) thousand(s) in the USA, 
Sweden, Ireland, India, Australia.... you get the idea.  
The format was Word, with occasionally some of the other 
business units being behind us in adopting the latest version 
of Word.

I didn't see the other locales, so I can account only for 
Ericsson Montreal, when I say copies of FrameMaker 
were about as plentiful and common as hen's teeth. But 
when we sent and received docs, nobody groaned 
about Word, and nobody EVER said "hang on while I 
import it into FrameMaker".

I'm sure there were user-doc groups all over the place 
using FrameMaker, but every engineering document 
and support document that went between/among us, or 
out to our customers (I worked for the Technical 
Assistance Center [TAC]) was either a Word document 
or something off a Unix station (but that last was rarer).

We had something called EDML (Ericsson Document 
Markup Language), which for-god-knows-what-reasons 
was some strange-not-quite-compatible offshoot of SGML, 
and used Text-and-Graphics Tool (TAG-Tool) on Sun, 
which was said to be a "corporate standard" -- as in 
corporate worldwide.  That one was always resisted in 
Canada (and much of the US, I understand...) and was 
probably a big part of the reaction that swung us toward 
WP and then Word. 

A couple of years before I left, there began a big push 
to:

a) convert any still-useful EDML docs over to SGML

b) begin having everybody do all documents in SGML

[This was around the time we were all going ISO9000].

The latter was "accomplished" (yeah, right...) using Word 
and broken filters, but mostly by having people use 
TAG-Tool. Of course, since TAG-Tool was on the 
Sun systems, that meant EVERYBODY (formerly 
just certain engineers) needed to run an emulator or 
remote terminal session on NT desktops, to access the 
Sun servers and tools. But, there was growing use of 
SGML, despite the kicking and screaming...

And still, I could have burnt the place down and never 
singed a single copy of Frame (in Montreal). 

All that to say, my experience of Ericsson, at least, was 
that they were not primarily (in fact, barely detectably...) 
a FrameMaker house.  Word, unfortunately, ruled among 
MOST -- out of the 100,000 worldwide -- who were using 
PCs, and that probably included more than 90% of 
admin/secretarial staff worldwide.  Could we then apply a 
similar grain of salt to your mentions of other big corporations?

I mean, Ericsson as an example, may have used bucketsful 
of Frame licences, but at the same time, they used shiploads 
of Word licences.  Part of the reason was that the same 
situation prevailed at our customers: AT&T, the various BELLs, 
British Telecom, AUSTEL and so on and on...

When you need Frame, you need Frame.  But I think not 
all that many people do.



Kevin McLauchlan
kmclauchlan@chrysalis-its.com    (aka  kevinmcl@netrover.com)
Journeyman techy writer, duffer skydiver, full-time unrepentent chocoholic



** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **