Frame vs. Quicksilver - Please help me save Frame

[Steve Rickaby]

At 5:47 am -0800 19/1/06, David Creamer wrote:

>I've only seen Quicksilver/Interleaf demo'd for me, but from what I saw, the
>cost of (re)training could be much greater too. I could be wrong, but I
>thought it made FrameMaker look simple. If most of your users are coming
>from Word, it could be easier, and therefore, cheaper to switch to Frame.

I have used both, although I've not used Interleaf since Version 5 (?) back in the early-mid 90s. From what I remember, it was horrifically arcane (navigating about seven levels of pop-up menu just to type a '£' sign, for example), and the graphics were worse, far worse, than FrameMaker's - objects moved their relative positions when zoomed. And you needed [allegedly] one full-time 'Interleaf Administrator' per fifteen or so seats, a major extra cost.

It might have improved since Broadvision got hold of it, but I doubt it. It did have one or two very impressive features, however, such as 'live' import of templates into open documents - which could cause consternation in writing teams as their documents reformatted themselves on screen while the template writer tinkered with stuff. Although I never used it also had a 'round-trip' Word filter that was intended to allow IL documents to be shipped out to Word-equipped authors and back with no loss of information.

Just an off-the-wall idea, but why not run the Fm and IL teams against each other in a writer's shootout ;-) More seriously, I would have thought that product longevity and cost of ownership would be your killer points, but productivity's worth a try too.
-- 
Steve