FM+SGML and Other Medtronic Uses

["Paul Kevin Schulte" <paul.k.schulte@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Framers,

Lest anyone think my good friend, and highly esteemed colleague, Jason Aiken speaks for all FrameMaker users at Medtronic, he doesn't. Neither do I. Jason was speaking for his dept., which uses FrameMaker heavily right now. But, I support the original FrameMaker users, namely our design engineering community. This design engineering community has been using FrameMaker on Unix for almost a decade now, with some pc licenses and even old OS/2 users thrown into the mix.

SGML may also become a part of our future in deisgn engineering. Or it may not. To illustrate, one of our other divisions that I do not support preferred WordPerfect for the same tasks I mostly do in FrameMaker. And now they've been forced to switch to Microsoft Word. (The same old tired arguments apply — it's standard to the OS, cheaper, etc.)

Will all of Medtronic switch? Or abandon FrameMaker some day? No one knows for sure. But for major portions of design engineering, we must retain FrameMaker. We have built up an incredible base of time-savings through very good use of FrameMaker and other tools and thus have positively impacted our cycle-to-market timelines, producing further savings. We won't switch lightly.

And in my area, I have the luxury of designing solely in English. (I know this places our non-native English speakers in our multi-national corporation at a disadvantage, but it's a long established corporate-wide decision.)

So even if Jason's area moves off of FrameMaker for Arbortext, there will still be considerable FrameMaker usage at Medtronic for some time. As with most things in life, it is not guaranteed for any length of time.

Paul
Sometimes the "InFrame nag" but not on this post


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