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



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