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I suspect that enough companies have different practices that it'd
be tough to please everybody. For example, many Purchasing people
(in my experience) are overworked and will pursue something that
pops up infrequently if prodded by a manager within the company.
At the same time, if there's no techwriting department, and
instead they're scattered to each her/his own local engineering
department, then each writer would need to get purchase approval
locally, before forwarding to Purchasing to have it fulfilled.
Now, if the renewal notices go only to purchasing, the writer
doesn't remember to make demands, and the purchasing person
has one less thing to worry about.... until the Maintenance contract
lapses and the local engineering managers get requests from
their writers for full-pop software purchase and start-from-scratch Maintenance.
Ouch.
Writers who work for small companies, or as contractors, must
manage their own tool purchases, updates, maintenance. Writers
who are part of structured technical publications groups have
managers to do that stuff and enforce standards.
Writers who work for individual components of widely spread
companies are stuck in the middle, and the vendor rightly wants
just one person as the official contact.
And then, there are the companies where IS/IT department has
a big /f/o/o/t/ ... er... hand in it as well.
Writing for a living would be great, if there just wasn't so much paperwork!
:->
-k
From: Paul Pehrson [mailto:paulpehrson -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: March-06-12 10:54 AM
To: McLauchlan, Kevin
Cc: Steve Janoff (non-Celgene); techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Re: Beta Tester's Review of MadCap Flare 8
AFAIK, If you ask them, MadCap Customer Support will switch the name of the contact person for upgrades, so you get upgrade notifications. But you will then get the billing e-mails as well. Would be nice if their CRM could have a billing contact and a separate software/download/user contact. I'd also like to see some ability to do e-mail management so you can unsubscribe from certain lists that don't interest you, while still getting those e-mails that do.
This is a recommendation you may want to forward to MadCap so they are sure to receive it.
-Paul
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