Adobe had introduced the Technical Communication Suite long back to fill the void gap and provide a complete suite for people who are into Technical Communication, Training Professionals, Help Authors and Instructional Designers. This latest release of Adobe Technical Communication Suite includes the following components: Adobe Photoshop CS4, Adobe FrameMaker 9, Adobe RoboHelp 8, Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended 9.
The whole suite takes a pretty mammoth space for installation, around 5GB to be precise and lot of time. The system requirements for this suite that comprises of two DVDs are Windows XP or Windows Vista, at least a 1.8GHz or faster CPU, 1GB RAM and 6.5GB space on the hard drive, DVD-ROM, QuickTime 7.4.5; some GPU-accelerated features require Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2 support; internet access is useful.
Adobe has integrated the products nicely, so that each product gels well with another one, enabling a one-stop solution for authoring. There’s the liberty for users to author the content once and publish it in different formats and languages. For instance, you can author content in Adobe FrameMaker and output it in multiple formats using Adobe RoboHelp.
You can also enrich content through interactive 3D models, rich media, multi-layered images, demonstrations and embedded SWF movies to create engaging learning experiences. Using the cross platform Adobe AIR Help format, you can push updates to your Help content even after you have delivered it.
Editing and enhancing images/screenshots for the Help projects can be done with the help of Photoshop CS4 whereas RoboScreenCapture, part of Adobe RoboHelp 8 comes to the rescue for capturing some quick screenshots. Adobe RoboHelp 8 also includes Adobe RoboSource Control, which lets the user add FrameMaker or RoboHelp files to version control. RoboSource Control stores all your project files in a database, enabling other authors to access them. It also prevents more than one author from checking out a file at the same time.
The suite features a new version of Adobe FrameMaker 9. Technical Communicators can take great advantage of the authoring and publishing solution. New features for FrameMaker 9 include Tabbed document windows, Pods (most-used feature panes that can float anywhere in the FrameMaker workspace thus, trying to improve the productivity of the user), dockable panels and more.
Adobe’s RoboHelp 8 is a Help authoring software that can create eLearning content, help files and other manuals. Its enhanced editing and layout capabilities enable you to create professional looking content, which you can publish to multiple channels, including Adobe AIR for an online/offline user experience. RoboHelp 8 incorporates various new authoring enhancements. For instance, you can create XHTML and other project files in XML, allows to check your file for W3C compliance before publishing, improved Microsoft Word documents importing (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .docm) that can be used as source files.
Creating eLearning designer, Adobe Captivate 4 lets you create content like Quizzes, widgets and many more. As everyone knows, Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended lets you deliver PDF communications.
With Acrobat 9 Pro, you can even design user engaging Forms and collect data easily from the respondents. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software lets you deliver the richest and most engaging PDF.
Considering the price of the suite at US$1,899, we feel that it’s a good deal for people who are into Technical Communication and want an all-round software for their requirements.
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