WebWorks — Error communicating with FrameMaker

If you’ve ever wrestled with WebWorks AutoMap, you may have seen the following messages in a log file at some point:

Attempting to Start FrameMaker communication...
Error communicating with Adobe FrameMaker.

These messages suggest that AutoMap can’t find FrameMaker (or vice versa), and if that’s the case, Quadralay offers a few suggestions in a TechNote.

But today I found out (the hard way) that these errors may in fact have nothing to do with the connection between AutoMap and FrameMaker…

…Instead, they may actually be caused by bad settings in the job schedule. These faulty settings apparently prevent the job from running — even manually via the Run command.

When the job is set up, if the job schedule was not defined (for example, if you canceled out of the task schedule dialog for waj <jobname>), the properties for the job (XP Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks) reveal that the task is set to run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.

Changing this via the Schedule Job command in the context menu to use a proper user name & password allows the task to run properly.

It would be nice if the log file would contain some sort of error message that points the user in the right direction in these cases, instead of sending us down the dead end road with Error communicating with Adobe FrameMaker.

Update: I’ve pointed this out to the support people at Quadralay, who have since confirmed the defect.