FrameMaker Training courses

This week , we've also added some new FrameMaker training courses (for the UK only, I'm afraid). These include: FrameMaker Basic/Intermediate, FrameMaker Advanced, Structured FrameMaker,Creating EDDs and Importing and Exporting SGML/XML.

MadCap Flare Training courses

Today, we've updated details on our MadCap flare training courses. These are offered as either a Web-based or classroom based course. Ginny and Carol will be attending the upcoming course being run by Madcap's Mike Hamilton, as part of their MadCap Flare Instructor certification.

New AuthorIT Training courses

We've added two new AuthorIT training courses this week. These are self-paced courses that allow you to master AuthorIT at your own pace. One course is AuthorIT training for users, the other is AuthorIT training for Administrators.

RoboHelp and the Tipping Point

On Saturday, I was speaking at the STC regional conference in Birmingham, where I was told that Adobe's RoboHelp team members were planning to come the UK. They want to meet the "movers and shakers", and that the person organising the UK end (who is not an Adobe employee) thought we should be at that meeting. Apparently, the RoboHelp team has been surprised by the "mixed" comments regarding RoboHelp 6, and it wants to get some feedback regarding the future direction for the tool. It's a good move. For a long time, the various owners of RoboHelp have, in many ways, ignored its community.

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" he talks about connectors, mavens and salesman as types of people that can cause the rapid adoption or dropping of a product, fashion or idea. Seth Godwin talks about these people too, calling them "sneezers".

In the Blue Sky Software era, the company nurtured these influencers. For example, it provided a directory of authorised trainers and consultants on the RoboHelp Web site. This changed around the time the company rebranded to eHelp, where they took training sales in-house and required any authorised trainers and consultants to (a) pay a certification fee and (b) sign a contract forbidding them to publicly criticise the products or the company. This led to a number of key influencers dropping out of the RoboHelp inner circle and start to look at AuthorIT instead.

When MacroMedia took over, it decided only authorised training centres could deliver RoboHelp training. This lead to the virtual end of RoboHelp public training courses in the UK, as these centres didn't have the contacts with the authoring community, didn't have the trainers to deliver the course and didn't understand the product.

As RoboHelp was left to stagnate under MacroMedia's ownership, we would talk within Cherryleaf and our inner circle about when and if someone in the authoring community would say "it's time to drop RoboHelp", and whether the power of The Tipping Point would be proven.

It hasn't happened (yet), because I think people still want RoboHelp to succeed, us included. Joe Welinske's announcement in 2005 that MacroMedia had put RoboHelp into "sunset" and that it would fade from common use certainly did have an impact. More recently, reviews of RoboHelp 6 ("RoboHelp 6 finally arrives, and it’s craptastic"), have, I would guess, shaken the RoboHelp team.

AuthorIT and MadCap, meanwhile, have been putting the hours into the community, working with the key influencers. Today, they have, in many ways, better products than RoboHelp 6. This strength, combined with a better relationship with the "connectors, mavens and salesmen", could lead to a big switch away from RoboHelp.

The challenge for Adobe, I believe, is to develop a better product and to try and rebuild relationships that haven't been nurtured properly for the past four or five years. Maybe it's time they read "The Tipping Point".