This week is really busy – the holidays are certainly over!

I don’t have a lot of time for a post today but I wanted to share with you the next interesting result from the Content Trends Survey. Remember, we’ll be publishing a white paper about these results shortly.

Interesting question

The question was “If you were to invest in new tools, rank what matters to you” with a list of options. I’m including Critical and Important as the colored bars.

This is hard to read at this resolution so click the graphic and then click it again to see the large view.

What I found interesting is that Easy Content Reuse and Reducing Layout Time/effort were so important. Other things are interesting as well.

Discuss!

You may recall that we did a Content Trends survey in December.

486 people responded, which was amazing. I’m delighted.

Our winner is

We announced that if you wanted to provide your contact information, you would be part of a drawing. The winner would get either a free license of Author-it or a free training class.

We have our winner! It’s Shevette Chopin in Atlanta and she chose a free license of Author-it.

We’d like to congratulate Shevette and thank everyone who responded to the survey.

Quick overview of the results

We’ll be doing a webinar soon to cover the results and have a white paper available on our website. But here’s a few interesting facts that fell out of the data so far.

55% of the respondants currently use Author-it and 45% do not. I feel we have a nice dataset of users.

Publishing outputs currently needed:

And outputs seen as needed in the next 2 years:

There’s a lot more where this came from, but I thought these 2 were especially interesting.

Keep watching here for news about the webinar on this data.

Speaking of webinars

I’ve got the next webinar written and ready to go. If you are interested in the process of chosing a new tool or tools in a vendor neutral way, the next webinar is Monday, Jan 17 at 7am Pacific. Learn more and sign up by clicking here.

As always, we’re recording this so if the topic interests you but the time doesn’t work, sign up anyway and you’ll get a link to the recording the next day.

See you there!

One of the older – and better, in my opinion – conferences is WritersUA. Those of us who have been around for a while still call it WinWriters, but that’s another whole story.

I like WritersUA because it’s very focused and to the point. You won’t find any presentations at a junior level. Typically, you see what’s coming and what interesting things people are doing that you wouldn’t have thought about doing.

You’ll leave with your head full of good and interesting ideas to implement when you get home.

I especially like it this year because it’s down the freeway from me! So guess where I’ll be March 16 thru March 18 2011.

Where do I find out more?

From the WritersUA site:

Registration Open for WritersUA Conference in Long Beach
All of the details for the 2011 WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance are now available, including information about topics, speakers, activities, exhibitors, and hotel and travel. Registration discounts are in effect. Four days, 70+ topics, 50+ experts.
Hands-on computer labs. Free Wifi access. Online networking community.

We’d like to know what your content trends and needs are for the next 2 years or so. Towards that end, we’ve created a survey. You can take the 10 question survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QSN8M2G.

Personal information not required

We’re not tracking IP addresses, although you can only take the survey 1 time from each IP address. Personal information about you is not required to participate in the survey.

We’re also giving a prize if you’d like to identify yourself. After the survey closes, one winner will be selected to win EITHER a free license for Author-it OR one free training session in the next six months. It’s the winner’s choice.

To participate in the prize drawing, you must provide your contact information at the end of the survey.

Tell your friends

Please feel free to share the link and tell your friends. The survey closes at the end of December, just before midnight US time, I believe.

If you are from the US, this week kicks off the US holiday season. We have our national day of thanks this week, where we gather with friends and family to eat large quantities of food. Because we eat so much food, the US shuts down Thursday and Friday to recover. And go shopping.

My husband and I will go to his mother’s house Thursday to eat and see his family. He comes from a large family and all the siblings live in So Cal. Many of them will gather, with their adult kids.

My mother-in-law will have children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren at her table. There will be lots of noise and commotion as the next group arrives, and lots of good food to eat. Everyone is welcome.

Because I come from a smaller family, now spread all over the US, gathering with my family is hard. Both my parents and one brother are no longer here to celebrate with. For my next birthday, I hope to get everyone together to celebrate but it won’t be for another 7 months. We’ll see.

Family

I like to think of the people who are interested in the Author-it products as family too. If you got us all in one room, there would probably be lots of noise and commotion as the next group arrives, and lots of good food to eat. Everyone would be welcome.

Towards that end, I’ve created a LinkedIn group for people who are interested in Author-it products. Most of our staff has joined and a lot of other people. I think of it as a large table where you can meet new people, talk about things that interest you even if it’s not directly related to Author-it and our products. You can post jobs, contact others, and just get to know more people.

To find the group, go to LinkedIn and search for Author-it Friends. Or click here.

Pull up a chair, have some food. I look forward to seeing you there.

One of the many things I love about our field is that we are always learning new things. I would hate a job where you just did the exact thing every day and nothing new ever got learned. That sounds like employment hell.

I also like teaching very much. It makes me feel good to help people get ideas that help them in their life. I don’t care if it’s teaching tech comm or teaching crochet, it’s all good for me. Students go do stuff I never imagined with the bits of information I give them. I find that amazing and wonderful.

Bits and pieces and webinars

I like giving webinars and, from the sign ups, you all like them too! In the first few days we listed the webinars, we’ve had over 400 people signed up. As of this writing, we’re heading towards the 800 total mark. Thank you – that’s amazing.

The webinars are a mix of topics – some Author-it specific and some not. The ones that are not specific about our products will be, in fact, tools-neutral. I’m hoping to give you useful information and then you can do what is best for you with that information.

What do we have going

For details about each of the upcoming webinars, go to this link and see what looks interesting. If nothing looks interesting but you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, send me an email at sharon.burton(at)author-it(dot)com and I’ll see what I can do. I don’t know everything so I might have to find a speaker, which is fine. I know some very smart people!

Can’t make it? No problems!

If the topic interests you but the time is bad, sign up anyway. We will be recording these and you will get a link to the recording the next day. With the world as small as it is, we’re trying to make these available to as many people as we can, but some timezone is going to hurt. It’s just the nature of the world now.

Looking forward to seeing you!

We’re starting a new Webinar series. Often, these will be about our products, but not always.

If you want to learn more about what Author-it does or how to use it in your environment, we’ve got you covered. But we’re also going to have webinars to just keep you educated in topics that you may be interested in around the content development space. And because these are live, you can ask questions.

We’re trying to schedule these so that they are available to as many people internationally as possible, given that the presenter – Sharon! – is based in the Pacific time zone and occasionally does sleep. If you can’t make the time or date listed, sign up anyway. We’re recording the webinars and you can get the link automatically the next day.

To see the current listings, click here.

It’s true, we are. If you want to work at a company where everyone is really good at what they do, this is the company for you.

We’re hiring in the US and New Zealand.

United States of America

Senior Sales Executives x 2

1. California – Bay Area
2. U.S. East Coast (virtual)

As a Senior Sales Executive, you will assume a leadership role within assigned Fortune 1000 organizations within your territory.

Head Office, Albany, Auckland, NZ

Senior Web Developers x 2

Author-it are hiring two Senior Web Developers in their Albany office who can really hit the ground running. Are you a smart and hard worker, talented and passionate about cutting edge web development that makes a difference? Are you the kind of person who comes to work every day ready to “make it happen”?

Find out more at

http://www.author-it.com/index.php?page=careers

Author-it has a new employee – me!

My name is Sharon Burton and I’m the new product evangelist for Author-it. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you and finding out what you want in our products, how you use them now, and showing you exciting things you may not have known about.

As part of getting to know you, I thought I’d introduce myself and then you can introduce yourself in the comments below. If we know more about each other, then I can better help you.

About me

I’ve been in the Technical Communication field for nearly 20 years. I, like most people, fell into this field and discovered I loved it. I love providing the right information to people at the right time. This field is always interesting to me and it’s never been boring!

I’ve been a sole writer, a documentation manager, a highly paid consultant, owned my own outsourcing business, and a contractor. I’m most interested in workflow problems the last few years – the How do we make the process of developing user assistance more efficient? stuff.

I want us to spend more time developing useful content and less time fiddling with our tools. Our value to our companies and our users lies in the content we develop and not in the time we spend reformatting the same stupid document for the 3rd time this week.

Other stuff I do

I live in Southern California with my journalist husband and 2 large young dogs. When I’m not working on Author-it stuff, I teach technical communication to undergraduate and graduate engineering students at the University of California, Riverside with my best friend. I simply love teaching these bright baby engineers things I want all engineers to know. Essentially, we’re trying to grow the engineers we want to work with.

I also occasionally teach for the Society for Technical Communication as part of the online certificate program. I like doing this because I’m teaching my peers and making a difference in the lives of working professionals. And that makes me feel very good.

When I’m not buried in technical communication stuff, I hang out with my husband, play with the 2 large young dogs, knit and crochet, design knitting patterns, ride my bike, write creative non-fiction, read, and garden. Occasionally, I do standup comedy, which is fun and terrifying.

It’s your turn

Now that you know about me, it’s your turn. Tell me about you. I’m so excited to learn about the Author-it community and what excites you about our field!

SAN JOSE and NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA – USA, DUBAI – UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, SYDNEY – AUSTRALIA and AUCKLAND – NEW ZEALAND – JULY 26, 2010

The Writers Block (TWB) and Author-it Software Corporation (ASC) have partnered to address the growing Asian market for information management, development and technical publishing.

TWB provides a 360 degree service of managing information flow, development and publishing for customers using a wide range of technologies. (ASC) is a world leader in software for enterprise authoring, content management, publishing, and localization. TWB and Author-it have formed a partnership to allow customers in India to benefit from the synergies of Author-it technology and TWB’s consulting expertise to address market requirements.

Together the TWB and Author-it alliance will bring the following benefits to enterprise clients:

• Increased content reuse (Author-it users achieve 80% reuse vs the industry average of 41%)
• Cost savings with content creation, translation and localization, and formatting of documents
• Professional and error-free information publication
• Improved end user experience

Read full story >> http://author-it.com/u8ml1h