Adobe is never going to live down the naming convention issue with RoboHelp. Maybe after they pass the new/old RoboHelp 9… I think of the naming SNAFU  like the Sierra Club thinks about a spotted owl. You know, the indicator species for an entire ecosystem.

If Adobe couldn’t get the name right, how much could they have cared for the entire ecosystem?

As for the reason that RoboHelp’s naming convention became a SNAFU, I’m just as much on the outside of that as the rest of you are. There has never been an official reason given by an Adobe employee.

So it comes down to Occam’s Razor between two theories. First, the Emperor’s new clothes weren’t worth someone losing their job over or second, the Product Manager didn’t see fit to ask.

From one poor soul on the HATT:

I was looking in Amazon.com for a book on RoboHelp 7. They listed a used copy of RoboHelp 7 for Dummies from the year 1999. Is this an error?

Rick Stone answered. I responded, not without a little tongue in cheek and a link to the RoboHelp Dead-again post. Please understand that I totally dig Rick Stone’s RoboHelp experience and his site is the best resource for RH users anywhere. He asked me to change the subject and talk about my time with eHelp…

I believe you used to be an official eHelp employee at one point didn’t you? Seems I recall you worked in the support center. Why was it you left?

Of course you can read that here on my About page… The rest of the conversation is on the HATT list…

Rick why not ask RJ Jacquez why he never brought up the name change; he’s been with eHelp, MACR, MadCap, and ADBE plus he is the RoboHelp Product Evangelist. If anyone should have been in the loop it should have been him.

Maybe he was working for MadCap at the time and wasn’t around. You know, before he went back to Adobe.

Updating Any Content Effectively Requires Feedback Data

Wiki strength is that anyone can provide feedback or edit content. The passive feedback of viewed pages falls under another product’s reporting (AWStats or WebTrends to name a couple).

Let’s examine the potential benefits that usage statistics and feedback could make to eDMS and/or wiki content. The two we’ll look at are Adobe RoboServer and MadCap’s Feedback Server.

Both provide feedback about page usage and search terms. This allows content creators and technical writers to evaluate which areas to focus their attention on, sort of like a triage, but MadCap’s goes a step or two farther and adds a Web 2.0 aspect with the addition of Comments pages within the web interface.

Understanding the origins of the RoboServer and Feedback Server comes in handy when comparing their technologies.

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