Presentations, Proclamations, & Predictions: FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp & Technical Communication Tools

Friday, February 9, 2007, we hosted a double-header Adobe product demonstration for Indianapolis-area help developers and technical publications teams. Our featured presenter was Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez, whose demonstrations covered both Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and RoboHelp 6. RJ discussed the new features present in both products today and discussed (albeit at a very high level) the much-anticipated FrameMaker 8.0 release, which, according to the grapevine, is expected to be delivered later this year.

RJ also focused in on what appears to be Adobe’s acknowledgment of the dramatic changes impacting the technical communication landscape—specifically, the convergence of skill sets. No longer is writing alone enough of a skill to differentiate one technical writer from another. Fact is, any writer anywhere can learn to write good quality content. To become more marketable (and to help them create content that meets the changing demands of content consumers), technical communicators need new skills, methods, and software tools that help them create content in an increasing number of output formats—videos, podcasts, interactive demonstrations, mobile online help systems, simulations, webinars, etc.—faster and more efficiently than the competition. Adobe’s move to unify a technical communication tool set is a type of “convergence” you are likely to hear more about. We expect this theme to permeate everything coming from Adobe (that is aimed at technical communication professionals) this year.

During the FrameMaker 7.2 demonstration, RJ shared with the audience Adobe’s aim to create additional “application packs” to help technical communicators create specific types of structured XML content efficiently. Currently, Adobe offers two application packs for FrameMaker: DITA and S1000D. We expect this trend to continue with Adobe developing niche solutions to help those who create highly structured and regulated content—things like pharmaceutical product labels—faster and with less chance for error. The Structured Product Labeling (SPL) standard, for example, is something several competing authoring tool vendors already support, and that medical and science writers in the pharmaceutical market need. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), SPL allows the exchange of information between computer systems in a way that cannot be accomplished with PDF. For example, the information in SPL can be used to support health information technology initiatives for improving patient care. It also provides an easy and efficient method of identifying changes made from one version of a product label to another, helping to save FDA reviewers time by pointing them directly to those sections or data elements of the label that have changed and need to be reviewed. SPL also provides a host of other benefits designed to “eliminate redundant data collection and improving efficiency.” Adding support for SPL would be a much-welcomed improvement for FrameMaker in the life sciences space and will no doubt help prevent those organizations that use FrameMaker today from switching to other XML authoring tools, several of which have offered support for SPL for several years.

While SPL may or may not be supported in the next version of FrameMaker, one improvement we hope FrameMaker users will see in the next version is full support for the Unicode Worldwide Character Set, a 16-bit character encoding scheme allowing characters from Western European, Eastern European, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Urdu, Hindi and all other major world languages, living and dead, to be encoded in a single character set. It does not, as some have previously and erroneously reported, provide support for Klingon, much to the dismay of the Klingon Language Institute and Klingon technical communicators everywhere.

At the recent event in Indianapolis, RoboHelp 6 was greeted positively by the attendees, many of whom incorrectly believed Adobe had dropped support for the popular help authoring application. New features and enhancements to the popular product documentation and online help development tool make it more attractive for single-sourcing projects, especially because Adobe has enhanced RoboHelp with features that were previously only available in FrameMaker.

But, from our vantage point, one of the most compelling new RoboHelp products is RoboHelp Server, an online help and knowledge base solution. RoboHelp Server helps organizations deploy and manage online help system content, control and monitor the use of web-based help systems in real time, and provide management with important usage information. With RoboHelpServer you’ll no longer have to rely on less-than-accurate psychic predictions to guide online help improvement projects. Instead, you’ll be able to monitor your online help system users and determine which help topics are most visited, helpful, and relevant. You’ll also be able to create Frequently Asked Questions based on—drum roll please—frequency!

All in all, RJ’s trip to Indianapolis confirmed what Adobe product managers have been saying all along—FrameMaker and RoboHelp are alive and well. We expect to see more integration between these and other Adobe products in the future and new application packs and tools designed to make creating technical content easier and more efficient.

Additional Resources

Watch (and listen to) an What’s New In RoboHelp 6.0?. In addition to a glimpse at RoboHelp, take time to discover the power of the new Adobe Acrobat Connect software that turns Acrobat into a webinar presentation and team collaboration tool.

Want to keep up-to-date on developments at Adobe in the technical communication arena? Check out Adobe’s new-and-improved style of communicating to its customers on the Adobe Technical Communication Blog.

More articles about DITA : Help Authoring : RoboHelp : Life Sciences : S1000D : Technical Writing : Authoring Tools : Adobe FrameMaker : Plug-ins