FM 9 Upgrade - Please share your views

[Tarlochan S. Nahal]

Dear Frame Users,
 
We are a small Tech Pubs group using FM 7.2 on Windows XP platform. Recently, it started to behave strangly and refused to import any Visio drawings. There seems to be no known cure for it with the current setup. Maybe it was automatic Windows SP upgrade that did the mischief. It suddenly stopped accepting Visio drawings in their native format (.vsd). The situation is so bad that even if we can import a Visio drawing, we are not able to save the document until we purge that drawing!
 
I called Adobe Tech Support few times and finally learned from them that they do not support Visio on FM 7.2 anymore!  Of course, we can import jpeg, pdf, tiff, etc. So we are contemplating on upgrading to FM 9.
 
I would appreciate if some of you could answer some of my questions.
 
1. Is it backward compatible with older versions? If so, how far back does it go? For example, can it open FM 6 docs and Save As FM6 or FM7 docs?
 
2. We use FM 7.x templates. Would there be any compatibility issues?
 
3. What are the primary new features of FM9 and what is your overall experience with it?
 
I will appreciate any feedback.
 
Regards
 
Tarlochan S. Nahal
 
Sr. Technical Writer