Follow-up on Adobe FrameMaker

Thanks to all of you who commented on my recent blog post, What’s Become of Adobe Framemaker? There are many ways to slice the content creation onion (or is that peel the onion?) and many of you are using a variety of tools to solve customer problems.

One of the first reactions to my blog was from Tom Aldous. A former consultant, Tom is now the Adobe FrameMaker evangelist. And he happens to be attending Lavacon with me in Austin, Texas this week. Tom understands the power of social media to communicate with his customer base. He was one of the first people to read my post – late on the night that I wrote it, in fact. Tom reached out to me and asked me to chat.

With a bit of trepidation, I located Tom at the Adobe booth. I am so delighted to share Tom’s reaction to my post. He thanked me. Yes, he did. He thanked me for my thoughts, for starting the conversation, for my candor. He spoke with me, sincerely, about what we are saying regarding Adobe FrameMaker. He solicited my opinion and asked for my advice.

Wow. That’s progress. Adobe has realized that social media plays a powerful role in the brand and in knowing your customers. Organizations often rely mistakenly on what Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, calls “psychic powers” to make business decisions. When companies engage, listen, and discuss with real live customers, those companies often learn really useful – and actionable – intelligence. And, more often than not, they discover that their psychic predictions were wrong.

So, my two takeaways are this: Adobe is listening and they care.

Now for the challenge – Since Adobe is listening and since so many of you shared your views on the current state of Adobe FrameMaker, what is Adobe going to do with this information? I think the onus is now on them to take the information from the community and put it into action. It’s their move.

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Val Swisher

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.

Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.

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