Tout de Suite...too many suites?
posted by Sarah
You may have missed Madcap's recent announcements of their sundry product upgrades somehow. Perhaps you were on a deep-sea expedition or out in the desert? I fully expect, though, that you would have received an announcement from Madcap via SMS on your satellite phone. But I digress...the topic of this post is not supposed to be the awesome power of the Madcap Marketing Machine™.

The Adobe Army has the Tech Comm Suite to face off against the MadCap Minions with their MadPak. Adobe's marketing is a little less...um, aggressive than their competitor. And let's not forget Author-it, which describes Author-it itself as a tightly integrated product suite.

So many suites...so little time. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. (And I'm a bit of an expert on candy shops.)

Except for one problem. Take a look at my top three requirements for authoring software:

• Creates XML content in my preferred structure
• Validates XML content against my preferred structure
• Publishes XML content through XSL and XSL-FO to create HTML, PDF, and other deliverable formats
  

None of the suites do these things. Oh sure, MadCap and Author-it save content in XML (really, XHTML, but who's counting) and FrameMaker can validate against arbitrary structures.

But as I've said in many publications and presentations
, the current trend is to take away publishing responsibilities from content creators. Instead of authoring books, authors are creating bits of content, which are then assembled into the final deliverables. And the use of a suite seems to go against that trend because authors are once again placed at the center of the publishing effort.

Am I the only one who would like to see a shift in focus?

PS I apologize to the French language. I am well aware that I completely murdered the translation of "tout de suite" -- which actually means "right away." I'm afraid I'm just powerless against the joy of really bad puns, especially really bad multilingual puns.

Labels: adobe, analysis, madcap, xml

3:14 PM Permalink | |

 
DocTrain: Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
posted by Sarah
RJ Jacquez of Adobe
Senior Product Evangelist, TechComm Suite and e-Learning initiatives

(This is the first time he has presented this content.)

There are now four generations in the workforce; the youngest belong to Generation Y, the "video generation," born between 1981 and 2000. This generation assumes use of the Internet and technology such as picture phones, iPhone, email, instant messages, blogs, podcasts, social networking and bookmarking, tagging, wikis, and Second Life.

Adobe is organizing the first-ever Virtual Trade Show -- a conference on e-learning (!) that will take place entirely online with no offline equivalent. They're calling it the industry's "first true desktop trade show." It will take place in Second Life or something similar.

Internet video is growing explosively:

• 9 billion video clips available.
  
• 134 million users have watched video online.
  
• 75% of US Internet users watch videos online.
  
• 181 minutes per viewer per month.
  
• 68 clips per month

RJ believes that people are expecting their documentation support to be delivered in this medium. They are looking for screencasts or short videos to help them. Adobe TV, which has instructional content for design professionals, is now delivering high-definition TV on the web.

95% of online video traffic is Flash-based.

Adobe is claiming widest "reach" in the world -- 250 million PDF files on the public web and 98% installation rate of Flash Player. He's also put Adobe AIR on this slide, presumably because they would like for it to become the next standard.

Nice demo of PDF with 3D. The example is a brake assembly. Being able to manipulate the model is kind of fun, but the ability to remove pieces of the brake assembly part by part is really useful. The page has a series of buttons that let you specify which parts you want to remove. You can see the demo file here.

Demo of PDF with animation. Very nice. We have an example of this in our Web 2.0 white paper, available here (PDF, 1.7 MB).

And now Adobe AIR. His example is Buzzword help.

(Side note: RJ likes the phrase "really, really cool.")

Labels: adobe, doctrainwest08, web 2.0

11:47 AM Permalink | |

 
Pass the popcorn...
posted by Sarah
There's a very polite undeclared blog war going on. Adobe fired the latest opening salvo in a post entitled Welcome Back:

One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. [...] We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007.

The ostensible point of the blog is to discuss a Flare-to-RoboHelp migration tool developed by John Daigle. But I love the bit about how migration to Flare stopped as soon as Adobe made RoboHelp viable.

And in the MadCap corner, we have Sharon Burton with some corporate history:

3 years ago, MadCap showed at WritersUA. [...] With an old technology base and RoboHELP on its death bed, the demand was there for a new product.

In the last 2 and a smidgen years, we’ve gone from 0% to 25% of the help development tools market. [...]

[P]eople are looking for a way to do more with less. I think our tools do that in a way that no one else’s does. [...]

We also have some product announcements [that will be made at WritersUA]. I’m not saying anything but this is going to upset the competitors in the industry. The stuff we have planned over the next year is going to make your life so much easier.

And there's some detailed stuff about customer retention that follows. I'm betting that's not a coincidence.

Anyway, I don't use either product much -- most of my single sourcing is XML-based and neither product -- despite massive positioning to the contrary from both company -- supports XML content. But the boxing match is highly entertaining.

[I have received complimentary software from both Adobe and MadCap. And, in case it matters, Just Systems. Scriptorium is an Adobe Authorized Training Center. I think those are all the disclaimers needed.]

Labels: adobe, flare, madcap, robohelp

10:05 PM Permalink | |