We’ve been on the road fairly recently to travel around Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to present this year’s Australian Author-it Days. It was a great opportunity to come around and meet clients, prospective clients and affiliates to show what’s been happening to Author-it. I’d have to say though – I’m not built for that Brisbane heat!

Author-it Day is an overview of use cases and demonstrations with some networking designed to bring together the local Author-it community, engage them and add some value. We started off with some presentations of Author-it, how it helps organisations and what people are using it for. Particularly we’re trying to reduce the lag in uptake of new features. Clients get the opportunity to upgrade to our latest features and these sessions gives them a chance to look at new features and how to implement them. Author-it 5 has some really cool bells and whistles to talk about – namely Publishing Profiles, Variants, Quick Search and some smaller features such as Quick tables, Convert to embedding etc. This was a great chance for people to see how others are using these features and talk about what they could do.

We also looked at some different applications of Author-it as there’s a lot of opportunity for the technical writer in the organisation to take Author-it and improve a lot of other parts of their company. This is a reasonably common occurrence, where the tech writer might show the sales manager how easy it is to produce sales documentation from a single source or use Xtend to write bids and tenders incredibly fast. Shortly afterwards everyone is clamouring to get a hold of it!

Towards the end we had a sneak peek at what is up for release next year. Author-it 5.2 is currently in beta and there were some whoops of delight when Matt showed off Structured Authoring. The UI makes this incredibly usable for the writer and also from a change management perspective. We also talked about our new content viewing platform, Author-it Aspect that renders content in real time using variant filters and a new customisable user assistance platform – Author-it Assist. ‘09 certainly will pack a punch.

One of the intrinsic values of Author-it Day is the networking. We want users to talk to each other and going forward present some of the very cool things they do with Author-it. Our software is very customisable – usually done by us during implementation but also done by some pretty smart clients and we’re really keen to see and share what you guys are doing.

But for now it’s time to wrap up ‘08 and enjoy a nice 3 week vacation over New Years!

Post written by Richard Ashurst, Business Development Manager Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them - and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #2: Migration
Migrating an enterprise’s existing information into this new format, requires a big investment in time and labour as the sheer volume of content is overwhelming in comparison to what it would have been 20 years ago at the time financial information was being converted.

And as this content represents 80% of an organisation’s data, the importance of the migration phase cannot be overestimated. In the end, migration requires a technology solution with some CMS’s more adept at allowing people to import content quickly, and in popular formats. Unfortunately, successful migration involves other factors, specifically the formatting of the original document. The less structured a document, the more difficult it is to import it into the CMS.For example, a manual created by a writer in the technical publications department will be relatively straightforward, since most technical writers are meticulous about style and formatting. But a manual written by a different department may present a different set of issues. We’ve seen documents created by HR, for instance, in which the writer came to the end of a line, hit the Return key, and then used the spacebar to line up the next paragraph.

Importing a manual with this lack of style involves much more labour and effort. CMS vendors without advanced migration capabilities may well propose that a company simply create all new content. But having already invested millions of dollars in their content, organisations cannot be expected to give it up lightly.

Of course, many of the same vendors are willing to provide migration assistance at a substantial cost - sometimes as much as $15 a page. One way around this is to migrate only the content that is absolutely necessary. Ie: don’t migrate manuals for products that are no longer manufactured or for procedures that have been discarded. The amount of content that can be left on the side of the road is often quite voluminous.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation.

This post is a more ‘fleshed-out’ version of my response to a question posed by Gordon Maclean (http://www.onemanwrites.co.uk/), but the question is common: “Now that I know I want to, how do I move from an unstructured environment to a structured environment?”.  The Author-it team attend many conferences both in speaking capacities and as vendors.  We get the chance to talk to people from a huge range of organizations, from the battle-scarred people on the cutting edge to those who have only just started thinking about how structured content will benefit them.
The benefits of well structured content can be quantified very easily, especially when this discipline is applied to the broader organisation.  In almost all cases one of the biggest hurdles is working out how long (and how much) to get from where you are to where you want to be. Once the enthusiasm of DITA or custom schema dies down and people realize how much effort will be involved in migrating or re-writing existing content in order to comply, at the same time as meeting their day to day work requirements, the task has become huge and the true cost almost unknown.  Every hour that a team don’t spend writing (meetings, problem solving, struggling with a new tool, can’t publish the content, etc), every hour a developer spends updating a schema/specialisation/XSLT, every day a project slips, all add to the true cost of the project.  When management add this up the cost of tools is often minor in comparison.
According to our clients this has been the biggest gap - managing and evolving non-compliant Topics when the technology requires compliance to deliver an output - eg. the XSLT or DITA Toolkit chokes because your content isn’t yet fully compliant.  We talk to a lot of organizations migrating from Frame/RoboHelp/Flare (and even Word) and regardless of technology the big hurdle is the need to continue meeting deadlines while migrating from unstructured content to structured content.  For some it’s easier to draw a line under the current content assets and start from scratch.  This is a decision that effectively writes off all of the accumulated value of existing content - knowing this value, and the associated cost of migration, and deciding it’s cheaper to start again.
Not everyone can make that decision and so clients look for migration strategies that allow segmenting of content, evolution, and tools that support them during evolution.
In the 5.2 release of Author-it we’ve added template-based structured authoring where, once content is imported (or written), you can apply a DITA or other structure over the Topic and see exactly where you do and do not structurally comply.  Once your Framemaker or RoboHelp document is imported you immediately see which Topics are compliant and which are not, but you can still publish your document.  You can continue to meet deadlines and always have complete visibility of which Topics in which projects need to be updated to meet your structure standards.
The Author-it Structures are templates that can be applied to groups of Topics.  If you change the template, all Objects inherit the new structure rules (or show you they now fail to comply).  Workflow controls mean Topics *must* comply at certain Release States (’Draft’ can be non-compliant but ‘Released’ must be compliant), and Publishing Profiles remove all non-compliant topics during publishing if you plan to use the DITA Toolkit or similar XSLT processor.
You can check out my short video on structured authoring

Posted By: Matt Armstrong,Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation