"Real Life" Migration to Structured Doc

[Rick Quatro]

Hi Dominick,

I would look at both products with the assumption that your documentation is 
already structured. In other words, the process of converting to structure 
will not last forever, so you want to find out which product works best for 
you once everything is structured. Once you determine which product meets 
your needs for working with structured documents, then you can figure out 
the best way to migrate from unstructured FrameMaker to the structured 
product.

I don't have any experience with Epic Editor, but I can tell you that 
structured FrameMaker works well. If your authors are used to working with 
unstructured FrameMaker, it should be a smooth transition to working with 
structured FrameMaker. As far as conversion from unstructured to structured 
FrameMaker, there are some good tools built into FrameMaker to do this.

Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
585-659-8267
www.frameexpert.com

We are still trying to decide which direction to take toward structuring
our document collection.  About two months ago, I posed a question to
FrameUsers requesting opinions on the best approach for migrating to
structure and received much valuable feedback.

I have been researching the possibility of using a company that provides
training coupled with consulting.  Consulting and training are
multi-leveled, depending on the price tag.  Due to financial
constraints, I am ambivalent about committing to a tack that may not
enable us to become self-sufficient.  However, I am still open to it.

In my search for the best approach, Arbortext's Epic Editor came up as a
possible solution.  Epic seems fairly robust, but I would like feedback
on "real life" experiences/opinions from anyone who has used Epic to
migrate Frame documents to structure.  I am interested in hearing about
your experiences with the product as well as support issues--Frame
issues.  I am also interested in experiences with the more traditional
Frame-to-structure, training/consulting companies.

...opinions and experiences, good or bad.

Thank you,
Dominick


Dominick A. DeFlorio
Senior Technical Writer
Plug Power, Inc.
968 Albany-Shaker Road
Latham, NY 12110
(518) 738-0389