Last week I travelled to Melbourne to the annual AODC conference. It was good catching up with the technical communicators there and gave me a chance to introduce a new direction that Author-it is moving in – Real Time Performance Support. I gave a talk about the background behind the rise in Real Time Performance Support and outlined how they are being used and to what effect. We have a new product release soon – Author-it Assist, you can read more about this on our latest products page of the website http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=latestproducts. I see this doing two things for people. Firstly, its a great way to provide contextual help – even in applications made by other people. Secondly these systems are used to create customized support for organizations tying all their applications contextually to their own content repository. We’ve done a lot of research and found that users need a support system in their work place that does several things:

• Integrates directly into applications and provides contextual learning without any need to access the development code or context ID’s
• Provide multiple contextual links from a single page
• Supports informal learning strategies (requiring less investment in formal training and less disruptive peer training)
• That serves up content using ‘just in time’ practice (push and pull the content to the user)
• Provides customized, contextual content that suits ‘how they use it’ not ‘how it works’
• Sends updates to contextual links independently of new software builds

These systems are being used to great success already and are certainly on the rise with the Knowledge Managers. It’s interesting that the technical writer is a big winner as it enables them to do so much more ‘retrofitting’ with their support material.

Do you, as a technical writer, see value in being able to retrofit your material into other applications?

Posted by Richard Ashurst, Business Development Manager, Author-it Software Corporation

One of the most striking issues facing our clients is how to extend Author-it’s collaboration further across their organisation.

The ubiquity of Word, PDF and email means these tools are a familiar, and therefore de facto, method to share and check content everywhere, but they offer poor methods for groups to collaborate.  I know Word and PDF both have review and collaboration features and I’ve seen some brave efforts to actually make these functions work.

After all, the thinking goes, if Word and Adobe Reader are on every desktop it’s easy to distribute a file and allow 50 people to comment directly in the document.

But this doesn’t scale – it’s a simple as that.  No matter how sophisticated your SharePoint system, or the forceful personality of your project manager, amalgamating and approving the comments from more than a few people is an arduous and error-prone task for the people responsible for managing the review process.  There’s either the comments from 50 people in one document (not pretty), or 50 documents with comments from one person.

So how to solve the problem? How to continue using a document distribution method that everyone is comfortable with, but keep the granular control and consistency that Author-it provides.  All without making the review process more difficult or timeconsuming.

We decided the best way to achieve these goals was to start where people are familiar (Word and PDF) and use this document as an entry point to Author-it.  That is, automatically create links to the relevant Author-it content directly within the Word or PDF file.

When a reviewer wants make changes or suggestions to any part of the document they simply click the link next to that section.  This opens the relevant Topic in Author-it for the reviewer to begin making changes immediately.

Because the review is now taking place directly in the original content source, all of the standard Author-it content controls, workflow, reuse, and release functionality applies.

The Word or PDF file no longer become the platform for collaboration, a task neither perform well.  Instead the Word and PDF file remain what they should be, a distribution and publication format, now with added benefit of linking directly to the original (controlled) source with proper collaboration.

As per I’ve created a short video http://www.author-it.com/videos/collaboration/Collaboration%20Plus_demo.swf to outline workflow and a few business cases.  Please check and let me know what you think.  This functionality will be freely available to all Author-it users but requires some scripting skill to configure for your own domain and database details.

(Just a summary for people unfamiliar with Author-it – software licencing is concurrent.  This means the Windows software can be installed on any number of PCs (the web version, obviously, doesn’t need installing on any user’s computer).  The software is smart enough to know who you are and configure functionality appropriately.  That is, no separate ‘review’ or ‘lite’ copies are required – if you are a reviewer the ‘advanced Author-it functions’ are automatically switched once you have logged in.)

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