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I'm writing to this mailing list looking for pieces of advice about publishing solutions for my high-tech company -- in the wireless field -- in the hope to get unspoiled opinions from people who are actually using the software, not just selling it.
We're used to write our documentation using MS Word, and publish it in .pdf format. Documents' sources come from R&D (SME's) and we at Product Management level roughly check it for structure, template and possibly grammar. Then we 'distill' the .pdf and publish it on our intranet and website. Future revisions might involve the Word 'track changes' feature, and all exchanges are email based.
After the acquisition of another company's branch, we came across a bunch of documentation which is in FrameMaker format and we are wondering whether this could be a chance for us to adopt such a popular tech writing tool, without actually grasping the real need of such a solution in our scenario, except we're in a hurry of editing the new documentation in a smoother way. Exporting techniques to .doc format are being under inspection. The free ones at least, they don't seem to provide a real method.
Irrespective of how we are going to solve our format issues, can anyone point out good reasons for us to adopt such a tool?
We're a global company, we are growing and we'd like to be more and more productive but still we're wary that it might get in the way.
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