Frame vs Arbortext

[Steve Rickaby]

At 20:17 -0400 25/4/07, Diane Gaskill wrote:

>Hello Frameratti,

I like that... but shouldn't it be 'Framerati'? You might be thinking of 'Frameretti', i.e. little Framers ;-)

>Remember the old days when we had debates and comparisons between the dreaded Word and Frame?  Well, now it seems that the new competitor is Arbortext.  I had my manager convinced to switch from Word to FM, even got the ok to build the templates (done), when along comes a VP in one of our offshore offices who thinks using Arbortext is better and convinces my manager to have us look at it too.

I know only what I have read on this list, although it's a subject I keep an eye on. My suggestion would be to carefully calculate total cost of ownership of both options. From what I've heard, almost everything is a mega-cost-plus option in Arbortext. Someone who'd set up their own system at their own expenses a couple of years ago was posting here, and I got the impression that although you can get up and running with Epic at around the same cost as FrameMaker, just to *print* anything, for example, was a few thousand dollars more.

These tools seem to be priced for major corporates, not for single writers or small authoring teams.

-- 
Steve