Richard,
Thanks very much for your detailed input. I am the sole writer for our outfit, with 15 developers in the UK and some management types in the UK and Michigan. I think moving to structured FM may be the better method for us for a variety of reasons, but I will look into the feasibility of having SMEs do edits in FM. Definitely food for thought. Regards, Jack From: rinch at Inficon.com [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 27, 2012 8:36 AM To: jackdeland at comcast.net Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com Subject: Re: FM + CMS + SMEs w/o $$$? Jack, My SME's work directly in unstructured FrameMaker 9. We all work on the same set of files in a shared directory on our corporate internet. I have a well-defined set of templates, along with a well-defined set of Corporate Branding Standards and Grammar Standards. I work closely with the SMEs. I help the SMEs set up the project, train the SMEs in how to use the FrameMaker templates, edit their work to standards, and guide the process from start through final approvals to publishing. My deliverable is always PDF ready to print on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. The PDF is posted on our internet page and/or shipped with product on a Manuals CD. INFICON is ISO9001:2008 Registered. I am audited regularly. There are 250 people at my location. We have 15 copies of FrameMaker that rotate through many different SMEs, depending on project activity. My Information Systems (IS) department manages the FrameMaker licenses and installations, IS set up the shared directory, and IS backs up the shared directory nightly. We've been doing this for many years. Regular SMEs have become very proficient with FrameMaker. New SMEs adapt to FrameMaker very quickly. We all have Win7 MSOffice Professional. The SMEs use MSWord for many of their project documentation activities. However, they prefer using FM for manuals and other customer-facing documents. I don't use a CMS. All project related files are kept in a shared directory. I use Bruce Foster's Archive plugin to keep everything neat and tidy (and to archive the files to a secure directory when the project is published.) In the past couple of years I have looked closely at structured authoring, XML, DITA with a CMS. To me, this approach is expensive while providing little added value and is therefore difficult to justify. I agree that just a CMS may be helpful. But, even just a decent CMS alone is hard to justify given its cost. Our current methodology works so well for us that I need to see real value-added improvement to justify the cost of changing. I've not seen them, yet. My SMEs use FrameMaker 9, a digital camera (to JPG), and a screen capture program (FullShot or Snagit to PNG). It used to be that I was the only one to have Photoshop and Illustrator to edit the JPG and PNG files. But, many of the SMEs have obtained these programs because they watched what I could do with them, and they want to use them for their other projects as well (e.g., Engineering Proposals). Don't be afraid of having your SMEs use FrameMaker for authoring. As long as you have well-defined templates backed up by corporate standards, you'll find that your SMEs will not have any issues with working in FrameMaker. Thanks! Richard ______________________________ Richard Inch Technical Documentation Manager Intelligent Sensor Solutions INFICON Two Technology Place East Syracuse, NY 13057-9714 phone: +315.434.2507 fax: +315.437.3803 e-mail: richard.inch at inficon.com <http://www.inficon.com/> http://www.inficon.com _______________________________ NOTICE: - This message including any attachments is intended only for the use of the designated recipient(s) named above and may contain confidential information protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail and delete the original message including any attachments. From: [email protected] To: framers at lists.frameusers.com Date: 01/26/2012 03:56 PM Subject: FM + CMS + SMEs w/o $$$? Sent by: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com _____ All, I have been tasked with finding a way to allow SME input directly into our publishing workflow. That is, the developers and managers would be able to edit text and add graphics to our source files. I want to keep FrameMaker as the publishing engine. I'm thinking a CMS would be in order, but the company is aghast at the thought of spending more than 10K a year on "word processing". I basically need functionality something like Author-it that ties into Frame. I could do single-sourcing with RH (we have TCS3.5). I'm thinking we would have 3 developers at a time who might be using the system, plus me. That's a budget of $2500 or less per year per user. Can anyone point me toward some current resources here? Thanks, Jack DeLand_______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as rinch at inficon.com. Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com or visit <http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/rinch%40inficon.com> http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/rinch%40inficon.com Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit <http://www.frameusers.com/> http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20120127/2cc50bc0/attachment.html>
