Maybe I didn’t do enough research, but when I was looking online I really didn’t find any templates in the class of Unify. So we had Word-by-hand (old method) vs. Axure automated Word vs. ID-by-hand vs. ID/Unify. The “by-hand” methods got thrown out because we wanted our work to look uniform, no matter who on the team was primarily writing it (and we all have slightly different conventions no matter how hard we try to eliminate them!)

So then when we had narrowed the decision to Axure automatic generation vs ID/Unify, we went through the documentation process, trying out each method on a small feature. I think what really won us over was:

a) the workflow of keeping screenshots linked into the document, so when we update a design in Axure, all we have to do is quickly re-take the screen cap and save it over the old one. With Axure, we had to do a full regen of the documentation each time, and then re-apply our Word tweaks.

b) the library of styles/pages/objects in Unify is really nice. It’s been fairly easy to customize, even for we relative InDesign novices, and we now find ourselves saying “hey, I think we can use the templates for that” when we’re making random one-off documents.

The main challenge I think has been the learning curve of ID paired with learning which Unify styles we want to use and how they inherit… autonumbering and tables were the pain points out of the box, but I think we got the kinks ironed out as we learned more about InDesign.