WebWorks ePublisher Pro... Ready for the masses?

Last week Quadralay announced the official release of WebWorks ePublisher Pro for FrameMaker, the next-generation version (continuing the versioning scheme at v.9) of their popular WebWorks Publisher product. WWeP, as it has already been nicknamed by people on the Framers and WWP-Users lists, has met very mixed reviews to date.

Though people generally are pleased with the new IDE look and feel and are happy to be able to have one project template for all desired output formats, complaints are already creeping in on the various tech writing lists. Of note (and please remember that this is info that others have publicly shared in various forums):

• Output generation is upwards of 3x slower than WWP 2003, which was slower than WWP 7... This is not a good trend.
• WWeP does not currently work with FrameMaker 7.2... expect a patch "soon".
• The accompanying documentation is superficial and uninformative, and does not explain how to make modifications outside of using the UI.
• Cross-references in FM are apparently not translating to working links in the output in all cases, where they worked fine using v.8.
• There's confusion about the style designer vs. The document designer (when to use which and why).
• The preview functionality does not at all represent what you will get in the output.
• Marketing it as 2 different products (one for Word and one for FM) has caused some confusion when installing the product, namely when installing the "FM version" and having the "Word Transit" prompt display.

There are many other mentions of issues, but the ones mentioned above seem to be common issues shared by many users/evaluators. Many have attributed this to a "1.0" product, but we need to remember that this is NOT a 1.0 product... It's a 9.0 product, and should not be introducing new issues and decreased performance where the product once worked well. If the intent was to redesign the product from the ground up, they should have done so while continuing to support the existing WWP product, at least until all the bugs preventing WWeP from being a true WWP replacement are addressed.

As of now, I'm waiting on upgrading my licenses to WWeP. WWP 2003 works perfectly fine, and I see no immediate need to adopt WWeP's offerings, especially not when there are apparently so many issues with the product currently.