New Software Recommendations/Ideas

["Hill, Leo" <Leo -dot- Hill -at- kci1 -dot- com>]

I'll admit that I only did a cursory search of the message archive for this question... I didn't find anything specific to this, so please forgive if this has recently been answered.

Our company employs six full time TechWriters here in the US.  We have one Technical Author in the UK.  Our UK guy is mostly an independent entity.  He has been using Adobe Creative Suite (CS2) for some time.  The document style that he has been producing has caught the eye of our US marketing folks and they would like us to adopt his overall "look".

Here in the US we are using Framemaker and CorelDraw as our primary creative software.  We use Acrobat to produce prepress PDF's that our printer uses to produce our dead tree manuals, labeling and other technical literature.  

We've just been through a round of computer upgrades and our manager has asked if we want to budget for any software upgrades in 2007?

The tentative answer is that we all would like to migrate our work to CS2.  The company is more than willing to spend the money for the software and some extensive training so we can utilize the various features in CS2.  So there are no issues there.

But before we writers say "Yeah, let's go for it" we would like to pick your collective brains and see if there is any other software suite besides CS2 that we should look at and/or demo before we tell management what we want to do?

And before anyone says to stick with Frame - we writers (US) have all agreed that we want to move away from that platform so we can more easily reproduce the look that the UK guy is doing.

So two specific questions:

1.  Do you know/intuit if CS2 is becoming the 'standard' software suite for producing modest sized illustrated manuals (about 150 pages max) and small QRG's?

2.  Is there a software suite that should be looked at as an alternative to CS2?

Thanks for your insight and opinions.

Leo Hill
Senior Technical Writer V.A.C.
KCI R&D San Antonio


*****************************************************************************
"CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:  This transmission (including any
 accompanying attachments) is confidential, is intended only for the
 individual or entity named above, and is likely to contain privileged, 
proprietary and confidential information that is exempt from disclosure 
requests under applicable law.  If you are not the intended recipient, 
you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution, use 
of or reliance upon any of the information contained in this transmission
is strictly prohibited.  Any inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure shall 
 not compromise or waive the confidentiality of this transmission or any 
applicable attorney-client privilege. 
 
If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately 
notify us at postmaster -at- kci1 -dot- com -dot- "


Kinetic Concepts, Inc.

******************************************************************************

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

WebWorks ePublisher Pro for Word features support for every major Help
format plus PDF, HTML and more. Flexible, precise, and efficient content
delivery. Try it today!. http://www.webworks.com/techwr-l

Doc-To-Help includes a one-click RoboHelp project converter. It's that easy.  Watch the demo at http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- infoinfocus -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40infoinfocus.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to lisa -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.