Blog by Ugur Akinci: Author-it’s New SaaS Cloud Authoring Platform for Enterprise-Level Writing – Selected Features
© Ugur Akinci
Here are a few really cool Author-it features that caught my eye during a recent webinar demonstration by the company founder and CEO Paul Trotter.
Searching for Content
Author-it is a powerful structured-authoring editor that allows you to use the same chunk of content many times over.
So searching for reusable content is a very crucial functionality that needs to be performed well to be useful and practical. Boy, does Author-it do it well!
Check out the screenshot below and you’ll see what I mean:
The search options that Author-it offers are truly world-class.
Moreover, Author-it also highlights those files in the database that contains your search term.
Suggesting Content Relevance
Author-it also suggests the relevance of the search results by using fuzzy-logic probabilities. Content that looks similar to the selected text/paragraph are highlighted with colors corresponding to that level of probability (see below):
Highlighting similar content with Xtend
Author-it suggests reuse ideas by finding similar expressions in different files, listed even by their availability in different languages (see below).
Reuse content with Author-it Xtend
This is one mother-of-all XML editors that will certainly provide a competitive edge to those documentation departments that produce volumes of deliverables from modular and reusable components. No question about that.
As a professional technical writer I really like Author-it’s sophisticated features and I wish I could afford a permanent license to use it for my daily documentation work.
I think this post needs to be clearer that the Xtend “fuzzy logic” features are not part of the standard package.
My experiences with AIT’s search aren’t quite as positive.
When searching within a book, you need to be wary of one important fact: as a user, if you say “find this text in this book”, the search engine will return only some of the truth. If the text appears as embedded text in any of the books topics, it’s ignored. If the text appears in a topic in a “book-within-a-book”, it’s ignored.
There are other built in search tools which only give a partial truth. The “Books using this topic” tab, for example, only shows “Books with this topic in their Table of Contents”. If the topic is embedded in another topic and *that* topic appears in 20 books, they will not appear in the tab.
Comment by Melvyn Mildiner — January 17, 2012 @ 5:45 pm
Thank you for your feedback Melvyn. We’ll look at your concerns to improve the product in the next releases.
Just a quick note about Xtend: by subscribing to Author-it Cloud you will gain access to Xtend and all the other Author-it products. This is just one of the big advantages of switching to the Cloud.
Comment by MImperiali — January 23, 2012 @ 8:51 am