FM 9 Upgrade - Please share your views

[Combs, Richard]

Tarlochan S. Nahal wrote:
 
> 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!

FM has _never_ been able to import native Visio files. You weren't previously importing _files_, you were importing OLE2 _objects_ (complete with all the Visio application overhead and potential instability). If you moved an FM file containing those OLE2 links onto a PC that didn't have Visio installed, the links would be broken, even if the Visio files were there. The links open Visio.

IMHO, OLE linking and embedding was never a very good idea except for casual, occasional use. 

There was some discussion on this list a while ago about an XP upgrade that introduced the more serious problem you're seeing. Use Google to search the archives (by adding "site:lists.frameusers.com" after your search string) for posts about Visio import. 

I don't think upgrading to FM 9 will solve your problem. Unless it was added very late in the development cycle (I haven't used the released version), FM 9 doesn't have a Visio file import filter either. 

Assuming you have the full version of Acrobat, the best way to include Visio drawings is to make PDFs and import those into FM. Your archive search should turn up a post or three of mine discussing this. 

All that said, upgrading to FM 9 offers a number of other benefits. It supports Unicode (introduced in FM 8), which is a big deal if your docs need to be translated. It has a very slick, highly configurable new interface. It can import comments/edits from a review PDF and manage them through the Track Text Edits feature. Books are much more flexible in FM 9 -- they can be nested, contain folders, etc. And there's lots of new stuff relating to structure, all of which means nothing to me right now. :-)

FM 9 can open older FM docs, but it can only save back to FM 8 (in binary form). You can save as a 7.2-compatible MIF file, however. Any older files you open, templates or not, are converted to FM 9 format when you save them. 

So by all means, upgrade. But you'll still need to change your workflow regarding Visio. 

PDF, I tell you! PDF! :-)

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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