Thanks for replays in advance..

Thanks for the input on where to go from here, since I’m considering attempting to move away from RH already.

Back when eHelp and prior to eHelp Blue Sky Software had direct control of RoboHelp, there were dedicated channel sales staff who would at least keep their channel sales partners informed of a release cycle. I’m not seeing that occurring here.

In fact, I don’t believe there’s an existant relationship between resellers and your product management group at all. So don’t hide behind ‘confidentiality’. I’m not buying it because it’s a copout.
Adobe staff stated they were releasing a new version nine months ago in open meetings in person with the public in Palm Springs.

I think that the raw deal that Macromedia stuck the RH user base with was pulling dev out of a product that had a strong user base while their support agreements were still intact which I feel was immoral however it was not illegal according to the licensing agreement.

My opinion about the communications loop you mention is honest but blunt and painful:

It’s not up to the resellers to find out about the product release if you want them to push your product. Nobody will sell it ‘because it’s Adobe’; if it’s returned they lose revenue also. Where is your dedicated support for these clients, of whom I may (or may not) be one?

Therefore – it’s up to you and your sales staff to push the knowledge, not up to the resellers to pull it. To assume otherwise is a serious mistake and frankly, it’s insulting.

I still have to sell a workflow. Your product is not helping me do that when it’s not useable with Vista or Word 2007. It’s not an industry standard to release workable software post-OS release. I’ve never seen that occur in my ten years of working with RoboHelp, and I don’t expect people to suck it up and pay the $1000 hoping you’ll release a dot-version to fix the compatibility. That’s a pig in a poke and frankly, it’s insulting.

I wanted to respond to your comments about the way in which Adobe informs its channel about future product announcements.

It is standard practice for all our members of staff not to provide company confidential information outside of the organisation. This includes pre-announcing product introduction dates. I am sure you recognise as a company that needs to innovate in a highly competitive market place, we must maintain strict confidentiallity.

However, in the case of our reseller community, we recognise that they need to be up to speed and trained on our products as soon as they are available. For this reason, it is Adobe policy to inform all its resellers of product introductions and relevant order processing information 30 days prior to product announcement via our dedicated channel portal. In the case of Robohelp 6 all of our UK channel partners were also invited in December to participate in an online briefing on the 11th of January, ahead of the formal product announcement the following week.

If you feel you are not in the communications loop, then please feel free to contact me personally and I will ensure that any issue is resolved.

Sincere regards, Mark Wheeler. Adobe Systems, Marketing Director – Northern Europe.

I found Monkey’s comment re: InDesign both interesting, pertinent and ironic. I feel there is a direct parallel between RH v Flare and Quark v InDesign (of which I have copious direct user experience). The market leader: overpriced and out-of-date, its publisher taking a distinctly lackadaisical attitude to loyal customers. The newcomer: modern, fairly priced, feature-rich albeit perhaps difficult to learn initially, but you soon get into it. If Flare or InDesign steal the market from under the noses of the owners of the space, good for them.

But, I think Adobe has responded in less than a year with some nice enhancements in what will be a much more rapid development cycle than most other Adobe products. My clients and students have told me they wanted “something” as soon as possible so that at least there was a tangible demonstration of Adobe’s support for the future.

RoboHelp 6 is a worthwhile upgrade, but it’s important to understand that development continues. We can anticipate the obvious integration with Adobe’s other technical communications products like Framemaker, Captivate and Acrobat. Adobe has been a strong advocate for such technologies as XML and DITA and lauded for the “clean code” of Dreamweaver. It makes sense (to me anyway) that this philosophy and talent will eventually make its way into RoboHelp as well. For some it will not be soon enough and they will try something else.

As you said, Madcap and Adobe (and others) will both continue their improvements and help authors will ultimately decide.

Sorry monkeyPi if this is a “plug”, but it might be appropriate to this thread. In case anyone may be interested, there is an eSeminar titled “What’s new in Adobe RoboHelp 6?” Obviously it is promotional, but it will be interactive, so perhaps you could ask some questions.

Thursday, January 25, 2007
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM US/Eastern
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=700382&loc=en_us

That said, it is unlikely to change anyone’s minds given the tenor of this thread, but who knows?

John

Adobe Certified RoboHelp Instructor

Where to begin?

Let’s step to the side for a minute and talk like we’re talking to an end user of the help files we develop.

They want them to work. And to be legible and easy to search.

How about the developers who are writing the code?

They want their content pushed through as easily as possible without taking their valuable time up with rewriting anything.

XML solves both of these problems – it’s something that can constantly update (like, with a dev pipeline using a free ‘fckeditor’ program you can even do it from a web interface and no, that’s not a misspelled profanity, google fckeditor) and something that with a command line interface you can constantly update the files. Not that this is the absolute preferred method of getting your help files done; nobody wants a monkey typing it out (apologies, monkeypi I am referring to code monkeys, not you)

So what am I selling to potential clients? A workflow. Pure and simple. Not a help file. I am selling them a method to save time and make more money.

Is RoboHelp helping that process or hindering it? That is the hard question that has to be answered. Can I do as much in RH as I potentially can do with Flare? Not today. Could I do it if they catch up? Yes. They used to be the market leaders. Now they are playing catchup. There’s a post on the Adobe thread today about that from the PM of RH.

In the long run, competition breeds the best product. If MadCap’s Flare stays innovative, they will dominate the market. If Adobe catches up to MadCap and can surpass them in innovative features then Adobe will win.

Either way, we, the consumers win by having the best product possible.

What I don’t want is an appeal to my emotional side for what should be a simple business decision. I don’t want to hear about what happened in the past, however much I love RH, I don’t want to think about the good old days. I want a solution that I can recommend to my clients as part of a workflow that will not cream them.

And I referred RoboHelp X5 to my clients back in 2003. They even bought Platinum support for five licenses plus a server. Do you think, Rick, that they got their money’s worth?

And don’t pass the buck to MACR saying that it’s all their fault and Adobe is scott-free. The business decision was made to charge $1000 and think that everyone would pay it. Hell no – Adobe give me some free updates first to let me try your upgrade and see where you’re headed. Build up that trust first, then maybe we’ll talk about shaking that money tree.

I love the InDesign idea. Have all roads lead to InDesign, and import the rest of the gaggle into it.

Tom

Thanks again for your insight. In the interest of clarifying some of my points, I’d like to expand on some of what you wrote:

Rick wrote:
“Misinformation. Perhaps I should place it on a line of its own so it can’t be missed. The much hated kadov tags are ***ONLY*** found in the source files. Unless you are deploying source files, they aren’t present in output.”

…and later goes on:
“I think you are trying to make me appear as if I don’t know what I’m talking about. As you have pressed on with this, it is clearly YOU who are sadly misinformed.”

theMonkey replies:
Sorry, Rick, but this is absolutely, undeniably wrong. I’m dumbfounded that you make this claim, actually… and claim that I’m pushing misinformation. Here is a screenshot of Kadov functions being called from my OUTPUT code:

Furthermore, the simpler Kadov functions are given classes in the project’s CSS files, bloating the CSS. QED.

Rick says:
“Uhhh, Notepad? Or is that not considered modern software? My own feeling is that while major changes haven’t yet occurred, we will indeed see them in a different release. Personally, I’m willing to wait.”

theMonkey replies:
Yet I can open thousands of txt files in notepad simultaneously, if I wanted. Each opens separately. You cannot do this with RH, so my point is still valid. And I must ask: how long are you willing to wait? It’s been a decade, already. This isn’t hard to do. It’s something even I know how to pull off using Expressions C#, and I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

Rick says:
“According to my records, X5 wasn’t released until January 2004. Which makes it only three years old.”

theMonkey replies:
Yes, I checked my records, and I was using X5 in 2003. Again, my point is still valid, though. Three to four years is plenty of time to solve that problem [adding CLI], so I don’t think your “but the former RH/current Flare team couldn’t even pull it off four years ago” point carries much weight.

Rick says:
“The cursor wasn’t a show stopper as wasn’t the ridiculously large arrows that were odd. They were just different. And to me, not intuitive.”

theMonkey replies:
I have to plead ignorance, here. I’ve just gone through my Flare programs (both version 1 and 2) and don’t see the large arrows that you mention. Maybe it’s something they got rid of during beta testing?

Finally, I’d also like to go on record as saying that I’m not necessarily pushing Flare. I’m not so much “pro-Flare” as I am becoming “anti-RH.” To me, deliberately choosing to use an antiquated system, that causes problems, annoyances, produces bloated non-compliant problematic output, and isn’t future-proof is folly. Use Flare, or Doc-to-Help, or FM/WebWorks, or whatever; but if you stick with RH out of loyalty only, you kinda lose credibility when you attempt to critically evaluate the other tools, which ARE designed with modern users and their professional goals in mind.

To put it simply, after the way we users were treated, we deserved a better “make-up” attempt from Adobe. At the risk of getting melodramatic, so what if the abusive husband has bought some flowers for the battered wife? Version 6 is a pathetic attempt to make up for how badly RH users were treated.

I wish I could show you the Google search strings that people use to land here at monkeyPi. It would break your heart to see how many people use things like “RH activation,” “RH support not answering,” “RH not working anymore,” “when-will-Adobe-fix-RH,” “CHMs-stopped-working,” “RH-maintenance-contract-nobody-answering,” “RH-output-won’t-validate,” and on and on and on. And after all of that, they give us this?

I acknowledge that it’s not Adobe’s fault, and they just ended up with the problem. And I hope that you are right, and this is just a bone to keep people’s interest piqued for a better version that’s coming down the road. Adobe usually doesn’t let me down, but given Adobe’s history in this area (the Frame fiasco), useful innovation with RH isn’t likely. I will continue to look forward to new RH releases, but until they arrive, I’ll be using other products.

Speaking of ideal releases… Know what I wish for? I think Adobe’s InDesign is the best thing they’ve done in decades, and one of my favorite programs to work with. If I’m thinking innovatively, I create plugins for InDesign that support FrameMaker and RoboHelp functions. Imagine that: a complete single-source document maker that delivers content however you want it to. I’d mortgage my house for a product like that.