First of all, thank you to each and everyone of you who responded offlist and onlist to assist me. It was sincerely appreciated, and one offlist response as I mentioned earlier was the saving grace. To me, the most frustrating part about all of this is the fact that Adobe still has such loyal followers after all these years, and yet the loyalty just doesn't seem to be recognized. Over the last two days, I have had multitudes of offlist responses about folks who have gone through the same type of licensing/installation discord with Adobe with very little, if any timely support assistance, at all. One list member even stated the following:
I'm so sorry that you're going through this. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm these days for Adobe. Have you tried tweeting their support page? I've had about a 90% success rate getting an answer through twitter. I've had zero success through other avenues. Really? You have to go to these lengths to get support? I was in the throes of setting up two systems over the last two days, and during this process, I had questions for both Madcap and Quadralay about some known installation issues. When I called Madcap (who like Adobe supposedly does, provides immediate and free support when it comes to installation issues), within three minutes I was connected to a support technician here in the states who could communicate clearly in both directions, understand what my question was and provide the information that I need immediately. The installation went off w/out a hitch as a result. When I reached out to Quadralay support, within 15 minutes max., again I had the response that I needed and again, a painless update and installation. In today's market, time is money, and money is tight, so the more time that I have to spend mucking around with a product, the less and less likely that I am to want to keep using that product. For my smaller clients who don't have any writers on staff and whose staff that is available don't want to be writers, Adobe Framemaker is still the way to go for them to do periodic updates on their own in between major releases. It's a true WSIWYG, and I set them up with clean, simple templates that essentially give them a click and point environment. Even then, they might have a few questions every now and then, and although I have directed them to the Adobe Forums, at least 50% of the time, they don't get a response to their question in a timely fashion, and so reach out to me. So, instead of being able to work through what should be a simple issue for free, they have to reach out to me, and that's billable time . . .I too have had this issue - w/ no response to a forum question. What good is self-service if you can't get service? For my larger clients, Flare is absolutely a viable option because they have a writing staff, and they have someone who likes to do the "under the hood" stuff for Flare with the CSSs etc., and they get paid to be on that larger learning curve during the day, they can deal with the implications of a not true WYSIWYG and again, the support is superb, not only through paid support, but also through the forums. I never once have had a question go unanswered on Flare's forums. To be sure, 3 out of my 5 largest clients have all switched to Flare for these very reasons. They were once loyal Adobe shops, but the bad seriously began to outweigh the good. I ultimately did receive a response from the Acrobat team yesterday, but it was at 3:30 in the morning my time, and over 15.5 hours since my first post to the list (which was only after 1 hour of Adobe support h*ll.) How is that "support?" And yes, there are several really good Adobe folks who monitor this list such as Priyank and a few others, but they are the rarity, not the norm. any more for Adobe. It shouldn't take an angry and frustrated customer crying out for help to get what they need. Adobe, you really, really need to step up to the plate and support those of you who still support you. The number of folks switching to other tools such as Flare is increasing as we have seen not only from personal experience, but also from comments on the Framers and other lists such as Tech_Whirl. It should be a corporate effort to train your folks to step up to the plate and provide gracious, timely and accurate customer service. As I stated, in today's market, time is money, and money is tight, so whether you're an independent or an FTE, ultimately the bottom line and customer service is going to drive folks to different tool selections. Thanks all for letting me rant - I just really wanted to get this out to Adobe. TVB _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com