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

If you ever need to make any major structural changes to one of your books then here’s a tip - before you do anything print out the structure of your book as it is, just in case you need to revert back to your original structure!  To print the structure of a book:

1. Open the book in the Book Editor view.
2. Click on the Author-it Button, located in the top left corner of the main window.
3. Select Print > Print Book.

…and now if you get into a real mess with the structure you can always flatten the structure so that everything is at the top level, get the topics in the right order and re-do the structure.”

Amanda Caley, Director, Content Chameleon,
Author-it Certified Consultant.

One of the recent enhancements to Author-it is the ability to use Quick Tables - a nifty little feature that enables you to quickly insert a table by choosing from a selection of already preformatted tables.
A quick table is simply a regular Author-it topic containing a preformatted table, with or without standard text. If you frequently use tables with specific formatting you can create a separate topic for each quick table, and then save that topic to your Quick Tables folder so that you don’t need to recreate the table each time that you want to use it.

Step One: Create the Quick Tables:

1. Create a folder to store your Quick Tables.
2. Create a new topic in the folder (using any standard topic template).
3. Insert a new table with the required number of columns, rows and formatting. You can set things such as the borders that are applied, the cell background color, text used inside the table (such as row headings), and the styles that are applied to the text.
4. Save the topic.

After creating the quick tables you need to tell Author-it which folder they are stored in.
Step 2: Assign the Quick Tables Folder:

1. Open a topic and under the Edit tab, select Table > Quick Tables then choose Change Folder for Quick Tables…
2. Select the folder you created a moment ago, and choose OK.

Once the folder has been assigned you are ready to insert the tables into your topics.
Step 3: Insert a Table Using Quick Tables:

1. Open a  topic and click where you want to insert a table.
2. Under the Edit tab, select Table > Quick Tables. A preview of each table is displayed.
3. Click on a table from the preview to insert it in your topic.

Voila! The table is added and already formatted as you want, ready for you to add additional data as needed.

Posted by Gretchen Rogers, Director User Assistance, Author-it Software Corporation

If you manage a large number of images in your Author-it Library, you’ll want to hear about a nice little feature we’ve added in Author-it 5.1. Using this new feature couldn’t be easier and the result could save you a huge amount of time.

Creating a file object to store an image in Author-it is a quick and easy process. You’ve probably been in the same situation as me though: you have fifteen images in a folder on your desktop which all must be added to your Author-it library as file objects. Creating the objects individually could be time-consuming and error-prone, there must be a better way.

In Author-it 5.1 there is a better way:

1. Open Author-it 5.1 and log in to your library.
2. Open the folder you wish to import your images into.
3. Select all the images you want to import from your desktop or Windows Explorer (it could be one or it could be one hundred.
4. Drag the selected images and drop them in the Author-it folder listing.
5. Click the “OK” button in the “Create File Objects” window.
6. File objects are created for each image.

There are a few additional points of interest on the “Create File Objects” window that you may find useful:

• The text “<FileTitle>” will be replaced with the images file name in the description field.
• You can choose the folder objects are created in, and the template they’re based on.

Sometimes it’s the small things added in a release can make all the difference.
I hope you find Drag and Drop Images as useful as I do. Check out the release notes for Author-it 5.1 for more features you may have missed.
Posted by John Mikkelsen, Director of Development Author-it Software Corporation