It's official. RoboHelp Lives!

Question

Thanx to Chuck Martin, scribe at the WritersUA conference
here in Palm Springs, there's good news about RoboHelp.
http://ua2006.blogspot.com/
There have been group forums and nearly 20 separate
one-on-one meetings between RoboHelp engineering and product
managers and RoboHelp users over the past two days and more
sessions tomorrow. Adobe has had an earful of requests for future
development. Clearly, Adobe has a way different attitude and is
aggressively pursuing new development.
Stay tuned.
John

Answer 1

There are still some who have not see the messages on this
and other message boards. To clarify and bring together the various
reports, I will try to be as specific as I can about what I know
regarding RoboHelp's future. This is based on reporting at the
WritersUA conference, April 9-12.
1. On April 11, at the WritersUA conference Karl Matthews,
Adobe Group Product Marketing Manager made a public statement to
several hundred technical writers at the gathering. He said that
Adobe is committed to RoboHelp and that a new release was in
progress and expected "in the first quarter of 2007, if not
before." So, while this may not be the "date certain" that many
would like, it is about as specific as can be expected, given that
Adobe is a public company and they must be careful because of SEC
regulations.
2. Among the 7 Adobe representatives at this conference in
addition to Karl were Vipul Bansar, RoboHelp's Product Manager and
Vivek Kumar, directing RoboHelp's engineering effort on the next
release, Michael Hu, RoboHelp's Product Marketing Manager, Jeff
Booher, engineering (who goes back to Blue Sky Software and eHelp),
RJ Jacquez, RoboHelp and Framemaker evangelist (also formerly of
eHelp), and Raul Ramos, Product Support Specialist (also formerly
with eHelp)
3. During the three-day conference, there was a RoboHelp
Customer Advisory Forum held with the Adobe representatives with 12
writers representing many facets of the user community offer their
ideas on the next release. In addition, there were more than 20
additional one-on-one meetings between RoboHelp users and Adobe
engineers.
4. The meetings of these more than 30 RoboHelpers resulted
from a public invitation to submit a questionnaire offering their
thoughts on RoboHelp's future. Anyone can still download this
questionnaire and submit it so that their thoughts are included.
You will find it here
http://www.hypertexas.com/
5. From my discussions with the engineering team, I gathered
that considerable progress was made at WritersUA. We often think of
these kinds of gatherings as superficial marketing events. But as
an instructor, concerned about Adobe's commitment, I was pleased to
see they came to WritersUA to "work" rather than schmooze.
6. Adobe is positioning RoboHelp as part of a family of
technical documentation tools that include Framemaker, Captivate
and Acrobat. Personally, I think this is a great group of products
as they can all thrive on the synergy.
The Adobe folks remarked that the rich input they received
will actually accelerate the process because it both validated some
key development areas as well as exposed others that should receive
more attention than they first realized. I got the impression that
because of WritersUA, the release would be sooner not later.
As for working with WIndows Vista, future XML help formats
and the rest, it certainly makes sense that a company of Adobe's
stature would release a product that is compatible with such a
major operating system.
I am not an Adobe employee, nor an official spokesperson. I
am an independent RoboHelp instructor since 1992 and very happy to
see that Adobe has taken a 180 degree turnaround from the previous
management.
John Daigle
Adobe RoboHelp/Captivate Instructor
www.hypertexas.com