Frame support costs?

[mcvax!ritd.co.uk!mr at uunet.uu.net]

I am cross mailing this to SunSpots and Frame to try and be fair. It
concerns a massive hike in support costs that we are being faced with.  I
would appreciate any comments or experience from fellow Frame users as I
believe that this is a widely used and liked product in the Sun community.
Please mail me directly and I will summarise if there is interest.

History:
1. We are long time Frame users who have been, and are still very
   happy with Framemaker. It suits our needs admirably (technical
   documentation, customer manuals, bid proposal preparation).
   We believe that the per-licence cost is good value for money.
   There are now 7 licences at this site for v1.3 and many users.
   We want to extend its use throughout our company (i.e. more
   licences).
2. We originally purchased via Sun UK and had support through them.
   Support was also through Sun, at the very reasonable cost of
   UK#540/year. In fact, we hardly ever had need to call on this
   support due to the impressive maturity of the product (i.e. it
   actually cost Frame very little to support us).
3. Frame support is now through a UK distributor, rather than through
   Sun. They have informed me that support is now to be UK#450/year
   *PER* licence. This is such a large increase in annual running
   cost as to make us seriously rethink whether we can continue to
   use Framemaker. It has certainly slowed down purchase of more
   licences.
4. I am told that a "major" release is due later this year, and that
   if I don't take out a support contract then it will cost a small
   fortune to purchase upgrades.

Questions:
1. Does my experience with support costs match yours?
2. Do you think that UK#450/licence/year is a reasonable cost?
3. Does anybody have a site licence agreement?
4. Anybody got comparative information on Interleaf?
5. What happened to the friendly Frame that I used to hear about?

        Martin Reed, Racal Imaging Systems Ltd

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