For several years now we have been selling our powerful web based authoring, management, and publishing solution, Author-it Live. It is extremely popular, and part of almost every enterprise solution we sell.

The challenge for our small to mid-sized clients has been that Author-it Live has been targeted and priced for our larger enterprise clients. However, everyone I have shown Author-it Live to wants it and are very disappointed when they find out it is outside their budget.

So… in response to your feedback we are launching, Author-it Live Small Business Server - a package specifically tailored for small to medium sized users of Author-it.

So why do you need Author-it Live Small Business Server?

• Want to increase your team’s productivity and collaboration workflow?
• Want greater freedom working remotely?
• Need an easier option for contribution by Subject Matter Experts and Reviewers?

In times where productivity and efficiency gains are of primary importance; anytime, anywhere access to Author-it offers substantial benefits.

What is Author-it Live Small Business Server?

Author-it Live Small Business Server enables authoring, reviewing, content management, and publishing tasks via your web browser. Now you can invest in an affordable solution that enables secure anytime, anywhere access to your single source content.

• Works in your web browser.
• No client software to install.
• Rapid, easy deployment.
• Create, modify, and publish content anywhere there is internet connection.
• Easily collaborate across multiple teams and environments via the web.
• Easy to use Web 2.0 technology.
• Supports up to 10 concurrent users. User licenses purchased separately.

Take a look at a short video I put together discussing web authoring, or for more information visit our website.

To make it even more affoardable and as a release special, we are offering to provide the first year of maintenance for free if we receive your order by Dec-31, 2009.

So don’t wait, contact our sales team today.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

Posted by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

Written by David Houlihan from Aberdeen Group

On October 15, Author-it Software Corporation and Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. announced a partnership they claim will open up a new level of efficiency in how multi-language content is developed and delivered. The two companies have accomplished this by building an integration between their two solution sets that effectively creates a unified workflow for source language and translation content creation, management, and delivery.

Overview of the Partnership
The partnership takes advantage of the two companies’ complementary solution suites. Author-it Software Corporation’s Author-it enterprise authoring platform possesses a very large footprint in source language content development, including component content management, project management, and dynamic publishing. At the same time, Lionbridge Technologies has developed a comprehensive set of translation management solutions. Most notable among these are Lionbridge’s translation project management portal, Freeway, and their Translation Workspace computer aided translation (CAT) tool.

While there is some overlap between the two solution sets, each company largely starts up where the other leaves off. This creates a very natural fit for a partnership. Essentially, all the two companies have done is build a shared workflow between Author-it and Freeway. As source language content is created and approved in Author-it, it’s automatically progressed to Freeway and enters the appropriate translation workflows. When that work is complete, the newly translated content is passed back into Author-it to be managed and leveraged alongside source language content.

The Impact of a Unified Process
While this may seem simple, the difference a common workflow for translation and source language content creation offers is significant.   More…

Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation

A couple of weeks ago Author-it announced a new partnership with Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: LIOX) the world’s leading translation and localization service provider.

The same week I attended the Localization World conference in Santa Clara, CA and had the opportunity to speak with many clients, partners, and analysts about the partnership. The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

While many can see the huge advantages in Author-it working together with Lionbridge to optimize the localization process for common clients, it was less clear what value this partnership would bring to the market at large.

For those of you familiar with the localization marketplace and technology, it has been clear for some time that the efficiencies realized by Translation Memory technologies, which were considerable, are now reaching their limits. In these lean times, organizations are now looking for the next leap in efficiency.

Some think this will come from managing and automating the localization workflow. I am convinced that while this may provide some improvements, they will not be significant, and will be largely due to the inefficient way in which people currently create and manage the source content.

I believe real efficiencies come from looking upstream to the point of content creation. The objective here should be to improve the consistency and reuse of content. This focus reduces the number of words requiring translation with obvious downstream savings in localization costs. The Nirvana in this process is achieved by fully integrating the authoring and translation process into a seamless end-to-end solution. By doing this, we eliminate the need for a separate localization workflow and automate the publishing process, thereby eliminating costly post translation Desktop Publishing.

We regularly see our clients exceed 70% content reuse across their publications, which corresponds directly to the word count needing translation. Just last week I read a presentation from HP where they have achieved 82-90% reuse on their various User Guides for Enterprise Servers using Author-it. Not only do they get the reduction on translation cost, but similar reductions in internal review cycles, and the virtual elimination of DTP, which in many cases represent 30-40% of the entire localization budget. These are significant savings!
So you may be asking now, why would Lionbridge want to partner with Author-it if doing so will reduce the cost of localization so significantly?

Firstly, localization is a competitive market as I am sure you all know – driven by positioning from SDL, organizations are being bombarded with ‘competitive opportunities’ to significantly reduce their overall expenditure.  Players like Moravia and TDC are jumping on the pursuit with strategic partnerships and acquisitions of efficiency producing technology.  Localization is changing fast for better or worse.  Creating intelligent long term alliances with ‘best practice’ solutions like Author-it allows Lionbridge to re-establish market leadership and better compete against the combined solutions of the top 10 localization vendors.

Secondly, the larger reality is that even with significant process efficiency, companies generally do not reduce their spend on localization. Instead, they get more value and more content at the same cost. This means expansion into new markets or localization of more products.  Indeed the localization industry has seen almost 50% growth over the last five years in spite of productivity tools like XML, Translation Memory and Machine Translation technologies reducing bottomline costs.  The business reality is there is just too much content to translate – finding more efficient ways to address this problem opens the translation flood gates.  While a ‘type of work’ shift occurs, it seldomly results in a net loss of revenue.

What the partnership does create for both companies is the visible thought and solution leadership that separates us from the competition, which shows our joint clients that we are innovative and can produce an industry beating efficiency for the complete end-to-end global content cycle.

I am extremely excited about taking our partnership forward, about out-performing our joint competition and about engaging our clients together with a solution offering such significant and compelling ROI.
Feel free to leave me your comments or questions.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

Posted by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

Amanda Caley, Director of Content Chameleon reviews Author-it 5.2 and provides a 12-step guide to assist experienced Author-it users in performing a first-pass evaluation of the new structured authoring feature.

Here is a copy of the article that has been published in the Communicator Summer 2009 issue.

Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation

I’ve been working on Author-it beta programs in various roles for 5 years, and have a fairly good idea on how many responses we normally get and also, how many of those responses convert into beta testers.

Imagine my surprise, when I checked my emails after sending out the invitation to participate, to find that more than 4 times the standard number of clients had responded! And not only were they responding, but many of their responses were excited; very excited.

The Author-it Assist beta program started today, with the first step being a brief webinar to show a quick demonstration of Assist and to answer some questions. Again attendance was overwhelming and the questions were coming thick and fast.

Overall, there seems to be an unprecedented level of excitement surrounding Author-it Assist and I can honestly say that I’m not only excited by this new product, but that I’m very happy to be along for the ride!

Posted by Julie Goodwin, Support Lead, Author-it Software Corporation

I have followed and used Author-it pretty much from the beginning. I have to admit often being confused at family barbeques with the technical aspects, but maybe it was just the beer..?  However, conceptually, Author-it has always been ahead of its time and a breath of fresh air. I first used Author-it in 1999 for a military application in East Timor and ever since it has been my primary authoring tool. When the opportunity to represent Author-it in the Middle East came up several years ago, I gladly took up the challenge.

One of the things that became clear at the time was that I did not know much about the Information Management field. So I set out to rectify this. I researched courses that could educate me and provide me with an informed and balanced view of the industry. I chose to undertake the Graduate Diploma of Information Design at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology in New Zealand. It was a tough course that probed deep into this field and kept me very busy for a couple of years. I expected this course would arm me with the knowledge to understand how Author-it fits into this industry. What was unexpected was that Author-it would be covered in two of the six papers on the course.

The first time was in the Research and Theory paper. This paper mentioned Author-it in the context of changing the standard mould and being an industry leader with new concepts. Author-it’s single-sourcing and component content management concepts were explained and highlighted as the next big evolution in information management. This was produced in the context of historical theory of information management.

The second time was two semesters later in the Information Design paper. The context this time was the techniques used to produce professional documents. Author-it was specifically highlighted as one of the first end-to-end solutions to provide a single-sourcing solution to the industry. Single-sourcing concepts were covered in depth as obviously this is seen as an important evolution of the way we manage information.

I am personally impressed that Author-it and associated concepts are being recognized in these courses. It is confirmation that Author-it is indeed an industry leader and that conceptually they are on the right track. I think the ongoing developments (Author-it Live, Xtend, Publishing Profiles, Structured Authoring, Aspect, Assist etc.) that have come out of Author-it are a tribute to them also. It is one thing to be an industry leader, however staying on the leading edge is an even greater challenge. Author-it is doing this well.

Posted by Mark Trotter, Author-it Certified Consultant, TrotterShaw LTD

The year 2006 was an exciting year, for all sorts of reasons. It was an exciting year for Author-it Software Corporation when Author-it 4.3 was released with support for the still-embryonic DITA standard. Who knew, in 2006, that DITA would come so far? (Well, we did, obviously.) As Author-it is a controlled authoring tool, built on top of a component content management system, with a multi-channel publishing engine back end, we were pretty much the first end-to-end DITA solution. (After all, end-to-end is such a fluid description. Just because we have more at the starting end (authoring), the finishing end (publishing), and that lumpy bit in the middle (content management), what’s to stop someone else from picking up the pegs and moving them closer together to create their own definition… sigh).

The independent CMS Watch published an industry report in 2008 covering DITA tools, XML, and component content management systems. As one of the few vendors providing a end-to-end DITA solution Author-it rated very highly. High praise indeed. Author-it being an out of the box solution that requires no third party tools or programming certainly helped. Interested in the report? If you are reading this you should be*. 2009 version out soon, I believe.

I don’t want to sound fussy, but first usually means… first. And 2006 is definitely before 2009. So unless I’m missing a very finely tuned definition of ‘First Authoring Software to Support DITA Publishing With No Programming or Third-Party Tools Required’ that somehow magically makes 2009 occur before 2006, I think someone at MadCap is taking liberties with the truth. Now I like Lewis Carroll and George Orwell as much as the next person but such blatant and farcical manipulation of the truth should remain in works of fiction. Or people should hire PR companies that do their homework.

Or, we could agree that MadCap has never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Lovely folks at MadCap, and Flare works very well and lots of people like it, but if no one else is going to call them on the blatantly inaccurate press releases seen over the past year, I will.

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

*From the CMS Watch website:
About the Report
The XML & Component Content Management Report 2009 provides an overview of leading CCM products as well as XML editing tools, including detailed comparative evaluations of 25 CCM vendors XML editing products.
How it will help you
The report can help your team:

• Save time in the selection process
• Create an effective vendor shortlist
• Avoid selecting the wrong product
• Budget more accurately
• Avoid painful setbacks

Who needs this report?
Check out this report if you are considering to undertake any of the following projects:

• Complex content re-use
• Extensive content translation
• Technical Documentation and other DITA projects
• Structuring common office documents
• Multichannel publishing
• Structured authoring with XML editors
• Managing information components at an enterprise level

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

With a background in education I’ve been interested in a number of blogs and articles that have come up over the past few months regarding ‘open source collaboration’ for instructional material.  Anyone who has used a wiki knows the general idea: ubiquitous, collaborative authoring by motivated experts un-encumbered by geographic location or commercial constraints.  In some areas, though, a wiki is a very poor choice.  Its egalitarian nature, informality and generally more limited formatting becomes the other edge of the sword.  The ‘heat/light’ ratio changes and users lose confidence in the quality of information.
Beyond the hype of open source (Free software!  No vendors!) lies the real beauty – altruism and belief that information should be shared.  There are some amazing projects by universities to enable professors and industry experts to collaborate on curricula for a wide range of disciplines, from electrical engineering through to agriculture husbandry.  A baseline of material was provided and users can contribute, extend and filter to meet their needs.  Schools and universities are then free to incorporate this curricula into their own programmes.
Here at Author-it we have a large community of intelligent users that have taken the core Author-it software and solved some very complex problems.  We get to hear about it but the information often stays locked inside peoples’ heads or drifts around the user community as anecdotes and rumour.  So, in keeping with the spirit of open source we have made the (very purple) ‘Using Author-it’ guide available as an open source project.  Our own product Author-it Live provides the ubiquitous, collaborative authoring interface via a standard web browser, to anyone, anywhere.  With our long experience in the documentation and publishing industry we believe quality and accuracy are critical and shouldn’t be sacrificed just to get web-based collaboration.  Author-it Live’s controlled workflow ensures that all articles go through peer-review before being made ‘live’.
At this early stage a small group of users will be contributing articles, and this community will grow.  The evolving ‘Using Author-it’ guide will be made available online, and for the old school ‘curl up on the couch with a cup of tea’ people, a regular update to the hard copy will be found on Amazon. (update - the ‘Using Author-it’ guide has sold out already, sorry.  More copies on their way to Amazon’s warehouse early next week)

I’d be interested in feedback from readers about the strengths, weaknesses, joys and disappointments of your own open collaborative efforts…
Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation