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
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
A really effective way of managing your review comments in Author-it is to create a number of standard review topics, using your usual ‘review’ style. These standard review topics should containing the questions that you are always asking of your reviewers and notes to yourself or other authors in your team. For example:
Please can you provide more information.
Is this correct?
Insert a screenshot here.
So that you can easily search for these topics the titles should have a prefix, for example RT: or if you work with a team of authors then you may want to prefix with your initials. For example:
AC: Please can you provide more information.
JH: Please can you provide more information.
When required these review topics can be inserted as an embedded topic.
Posted By Amanda Caley, Director, Content Chameleon, Author-it Certified Consultant
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.
Because Author-it is a component content management system, you’ll find that you work with a lot of individual topic objects. If you’re working on a book (aka a “project” in other applications), you can quickly create a list of topics in that book using the following procedure:
Voila 
You can use the same technique to create a list of all topics in the library, or with 5.x, for topics in multiple books. (Click the ellipsis button next to In Book and select the books you want to use.) You can also use the same technique to create lists of any object type, such as index entries, graphics, hyperlinks, and so on.
By Char James-Tanny, Author-it Certified Consultant, JTF Associates Inc. Published with permission; first published on the helpstuff blog.
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:
After creating the quick tables you need to tell Author-it which folder they are stored in.
Step 2: Assign the Quick Tables Folder:
Once the folder has been assigned you are ready to insert the tables into your topics.
Step 3: Insert a Table Using Quick Tables:
Voila! The table is added and already formatted as you want, ready for you to add additional data as needed.
Posted by Gretchen Rogers, 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:
There are a few additional points of interest on the “Create File Objects” window that you may find useful:
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
