Is FrameMaker 11 going down or is it a keeper?

[Michael Norton]

I've worked in two (US) companies this year and FrameMaker was the main documentation tool used in both. The first company was medium-sized (around 300 employees) before being bought by a very large company. We were using FrameMaker 7.2 in unstructured mode and our main output was PDF manuals. We were also beginning to use Flare more and more. We did not feel like Flare's PDF output capabilities were sufficient to use only Flare. Like the old RoboHelp, Madcap is better at marketing a solution than building one.

In my current company, which is around 75 employees, we have FrameMaker v10 and the other apps included in TCS3. This company is still transitioning from Word to FrameMaker. There are no plans to move to TCS4 at this point.

FrameMaker seems to be working fine for us. Pod madness takes some getting used to, but I like v10 alright. It is not as stable as the earlier versions I have used (from v3-v8), but I still prefer it to Word, Flare, or RoboHelp. I hope to next year look into Frame + Mif2Go for our Help needs and possibly for our knowledge base needs.

FrameMaker works for us and should continue to do so in the near future, but I would agree that Adobe's ownership has not been good for the Frame community. It is far more buggy than before and the doc for it kind of sucks. At one time, FrameMaker had great documentation and the product was rock-solid.

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Michael Norton | Technical Writer
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