PTC Live Global and Arbortext

[celliott]

Dear Arbortext community members,

I understand that many of you have received emails from the PTC/User Community and PTC/User Technical Committee leadership regarding opportunities to submit topics for PTC Live Global. As you know, this event has grown into a global user event for product development professionals. However, at this time we aren't offering any Arbortext or other service topics at the PTC Live Global event. We continue to investigate new avenues to support that growing user community and appreciate that we have a critical gap in this regard.

Following the email threads from adepters regarding this topic, we would like to connect with interested Arbortext users how PTC SLM can help support regional and virtual meetings, hosted by our regional users and partners. In addition to Arbortext, we will be moving forward with this effort for many of the expanded / acquired products within SLM, including Servigsitics and Enigma. If you are interested in helping with this initiative, please contact me with any questions or suggestions. In the short-term, please remember that the PTC online community provides an Arbortext Community<">http://communities.ptc.com/community/arbortext> and I encourage additional participation there.

For your reference, PTC will host its second annual PTC Live Service Exchange
www.ptc.com/go/service<">http://www.ptc.com/go/service>

[DavidS.Taylor]

I think Cindy's email indicates the crux of the problem quite clearly. PTC does not view Arbortext as a product.

To the legacy Arbortext user it is THE product, the product we've used for nearly 20 years. The strong user community and its high level of technical expertise, and the long-standing customer applications that use Arbortext, should not be viewed as a 'service' in the way PTC has come to view Arbortext.

The AUGI conventions were dynamic, well attended and very useful to all Arbortext users, whether they could attend or not. Ideas, solutions and community building were what AUGIs were all about. By all accounts they were very successful.

It's unfortunate that PTC sees Arbortext in a different light.

David

David S. Taylor

Project Manager, Production and Marketing
Building Regulations | NRC Construction
National Research Council Canada
Building M-23A, Room 114 | 1200 Montreal Road | Ottawa, ON | K1A 0R6
Telephone: +1.613.990.2731 | Fax: +1.613.952.4040
David.S.Taylor@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca<">mailto:David.S.Taylor@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca>

[ebenton]

I have seen this coming since the beginning, when PTC bought out Arbortext. (Arbortext sold out to PTC?). It has been a natural process, as PTC has been digesting Arbortext. It will be interesting (sort of) to see what PTC's peristalsis produces on the other end, if we're not already there.

[ptc-953926]

I've seen nothing good about Arbortext getting absorbed by PTC. We lost some amazing contributors to Adepters. For me it introduced the problem of our main XML authoring tool now controlled by one of our biggest competitors - PTC. We're evaluating Oxygen and have looked seriously at XMetaL only because upper management can't understand why we use a PTC product. When Arbortext was independent, we used get visits from our customer rep. at least twice a year. I recently asked my boss if she knew who our customer rep. was, and she said she had no idea. Maybe they are a thing of the past.

[KarlJohanKleist]

As I see it, the whole concept of XML authoring is squeezed between a
rock and a hard place.



The rock being, of course, Microsoft Word and its evolving XML
capabilities. Add Sharepoint to the equation, and their offering is
considered good enough by many companies.



The hard place would be HTML/CSS based solutions, using formatting
engines like PDFreactor or Prince.



I just dug up an old posting from the DSSL list (anybody still
remembers?) where James Clark wrote:



"There are big advantages to being in the mainstream,
and XSLT looks set to become a mainstream technology."



"My general feeling is that just as the future is XML not SGML,
so the future is also XSL not DSSSL."



"I have sometimes wondered whether I wasted
five years of my life doing DSSSL and Jade"



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