So Long and Thanks for the Fish -- Migrating from FrameMaker to Flare

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

Hi, Joseph.

You are not the only one who is abandoning FrameMaker ... if you look at my posts in the past months, I have done the same although I have been using it since 1988 off and on. I am still on the list for old times sake, though. :)

Please do send me your detailed reasons in an off-list e-mail - would like to know your decision trigger! For me, it was the (a) recent over-pricing for some version upgrades that should have been done as free bug fixes, (b) the Adobe trend (albeit not yet announced for FrameMaker) to SAAS as the only licensing mechanism, and (c) their abandonment of small users (i.e., number of licenses) from their multi-year update licensing system.

Today, all my new documents are no longer in FrameMaker. I am only using it for maintaining and changing old documents, and if the change is large enough, I move it off FrameMaker. That takes a couple of days - even for the large documents - and then I am fine for the future! In time, all my old documents will be moved from FrameMaker.

However, I have not chosen Flare as my platform, although it looks quite capable. Switching to it is expensive (of course, if they made me a $199 one-time offer to switch from FrameMaker to Flare, I would do it! :))

For now, for my needs (which may not apply to everybody), a combination of Word 2013 for short documents (less than 10 to 20 pages), and LaTex (for large multi-hundred page specifications) is proving quite workable. Not perfect, and not as flexible as FrameMaker, but the costly "upgrades" of FrameMaker is not acceptable, and the trend to equally costly SAAS is a deal-breaker.

BTW, LaTeX in particular allows me to achieve *complete* look-and-feel consistency in my specifications - formatting is separate from text entry - and I value that highly. It was my reason for selecting FrameMaker over Word about 12 years ago for my current company.

Regards, and good luck!

Z

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Joseph Lorenzini
Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2013 10:13 AM
To: FrameMaker Forum; TCS-Users at googlegroups.com
Subject: So Long and Thanks for the Fish -- Migrating from FrameMaker to Flare

Hi all,

I have used FrameMaker for over 5 years. I have used it to produce thousands of pages of documentation. And I honestly thought that FM was a great tool...for a time. Plus, the community was super helpful.

So its with some regret that I am telling you that I am leaving this community and the TCS suite. I am adopting Flare as a replacement. Please note I am no evangelist of Flare nor do I think that there's One Right Tool. FrameMaker can be a great solution for some and if works for you then great. The reasons why I made this choice were driven by a specific business and use case

There are many reasons for this but that would cause this post to grow quite large and I didn't want to flood this community with a gigantic post about why I am not using its tool anymore.

That said, my experience of why and how i migrated may be of interest to others in this forum. If you'd like a detailed explanation and are curious to learn more, I would be happy to share those details with you offline. Feel free to email me.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20131028/ef3f24e7/attachment.htm>