FM/RoboHelp Integration

Actually, that's rather presumptuous to assume my company was too cheap to buy the suite.  We have been Adobe users long before the suites came out.  And, yes, we have had the maintenance agreements, so we have been upgrading regularly.

We started using FrameMaker 4, Acrobat Pro (Exchange), and Robohelp (from Blue Sky Software) in the mid 90s.  We have faithfully upgraded FM and Acrobat all along.  In fact, we used Acrobat to upgrade to Creative Suite when it came out, so we already have a good portion of the Tech Comm Suite.

The disconnect came in 2005.  As I stated previously, I saw RoboHelp for FrameMaker at the 2004 STC conference.  When we were due to upgrade RoboHelp in early 2005, I received approval to buy RoboHelp for FrameMaker.  Much to my dismay, Macromedia told me that RoboHelp for FrameMaker had been discontinued.

I then put together a quote for RoboHelp X5 Enterprise version, only to have Adobe and Macromedia merge (buyout, whatever) and announce they were discontinuing RoboHelp.  Imagine trying to justify spending several thousand dollars on the second version of RoboHelp to be discontinued within a few short months of each other.  Plus, now RoboHelp was at a third company.

At that point, my purchase order was rescinded, and I was told to search for other options.  Since I knew Mike from his RoboHelp days, it appeared that Flare was the best option at the time, so we moved to Flare.

Now, we are considering moving back to RoboHelp, but I'm disillusioned that it still isn't integrated six years after Macromedia proved this could be done with a standalone version.  Also, it's hard to justify a second suite, when we already have a suite and basically have everything except RoboHelp from the Tech Comm Suite.  Plus, there's the baggage of explaining to my executives that, yes, this is the same product the company said they were discontinuing five years ago.  And now I have to compound that with trying to explain to executives who do not use the software that, no, RoboHelp standalone is different than RoboHelp in a suite.

Adobe certainly isn't making a switch back easier, especially when we are also evaluating AuthorIt and MadPak.  We've gone through a pre-sales person and a salesperson, who eventually shifted us back to the reseller we have been using.  Also, the reps were not able to tell me whether or not RoboHelp was integrated in the standalone version - so you can add poor customer service to the mix.

Needless to say, this has been rather exasperating.