Thanks for identifying your short list of needs. Scheduling and script support make for a nice, focused feature list. Splitting out just those features might allow us to provide AutoMap at a lower cost than the current packaging allows.

I’ve used AutoMap with the WebWorks 7 product, and the UNIX batch utility that predated AutoMap. Both worked great. But we just don’t have the budget for the current AutoMap product for ePublisher.

Alex.

Thanks for your feedback. I’m wondering if you can elaborate further on the pricing issue.

What did you pay for AutoMap a couple of years back? We’ve move our pricing around over time and I’d like to hear from you what you used to see versus today.

I’m wondering if you purchased AutoMap as part of the old “Enterprise platform”, where it was sold and licensed per seat as opposed to now where it is licensed per server.

Thanks!

90% of Automap’s value to me was scheduled generation. I didn’t use the pre- or post-scripting capabilities until fairly late in the game, and even then it was for non-critical, nice-to-have functionality. For CMS, I wrote my own scripts which executed before Automap ever kicked off.

Same thing with e-mail — I never used the built-in feature.

All I really want is the ability to schedule overnight builds, and I’m not prepared to pay the current asking price for that.

Job queueing would have been a nice feature — it would have prevented many “train wreck” builds that I had to sort out in the morning. But I survived for years without it by carefully and manually scheduling jobs with buffer space between them. Again, I’m not sure how much extra I would pay for what seems to be a basic usability enhancement.

I know you folks need to make money selling this software — we’re all in that boat. But you’re dangerously close to a tipping point. I almost didn’t convert this place to ePub Pro & Express when I got here because of cost. Automap was out of the question.

Thanks for soliciting our feedback. Hope it’s helpful.

For Auto to work better for us (and sell more copies for you), we need a helluvalot more doco on its workings, and even more adaptible, real-world, sample scripts.

Notwithstanding the above, I do know that you are faced with the same too-few-hands-not-enough-time constraints as the rest of us. But wouldn’t it be nice …

jjj

BTW: 2010.1 now has “non-GUI support for expressions” … and that’s all the help a user gets from Quadralay. Folks, tools to create documentation should be well documented themselves.