TICAD 2006

I spent yesterday at TICAD 2006, exhibiting and speaking at the conference. There were some really good speakers this year. I liked Tom Fitzgerald's suggestion of taking one question from the support team that isn't documented and calculating the costs for handling these calls. For one client, he'd extrapolated the cost for all the gaps in its user documentation: it came to $18 million.

It was good to hear Adobe announce that FrameMaker 7.3 will ship in early 2007, and that it will support Unicode (which will make translating FrameMaker files easier). I spoke to a few people there about RoboHelp X6 (currently available in beta). They were underwhelmed with it, saying it offers little over the current version, RoboHelp X5.