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Our shop, as always, is stretched to the max, developing some 40 plus
documents per year between two (now three) people. Each document is 50
percent unique, with the other half being custom copy. I've pushed Word and
RTF to the max, database-enabling Word, creating several work-around macros,
and dynamically stitching together Word documents that otherwise would be 15
meg plus. Even with that, three of our documents were corrupted in the last
year.
Can you hear my pain?
We've kept our schedule with these changes but couldn't add HTML Help and
couldn't support the Lotus or WordPerfect formats some of our customers
prefer. FrameMaker supported by a database of XML text seemed to be the only
solution. It's cross platform, it allows us to do lots of different types of
help, print, and intranet projects and it keeps the bean counters happy.
It's also stable, which even though I like Word is not something I can say
about Word.
Maybe we're a bunch of blind joggers running into New York traffic at
lunchtime, but for dependability and versatility, I couldn't see any other
solution but FrameMaker and XML.
Tell me what you think.
Ed
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Giordano, Connie [SMTP:Connie -dot- Giordano -at- FMR -dot- COM]
> Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 5:31 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Cc: Johnson Andy
> Subject: RE: Future XMLers (was document management and xml)
>
> Ed and other Whirlers,
>
> I'm not a Framemaker or XML expert, so I have dumb question: why move to
> Framemaker, which uses SGML? I make no pretension to understanding the
> differences between XML and SGML. I guess the reason I'm curious is that
> I'm documenting applications written in VB and XML, and wondered if there
> would be an advantage to moving to authoring tools other than Word and
> Robohelp html now, or if I should consider it for future product releases.
>
> Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.
>
> Connie Giordano
>
