While I’ve spent my career in the software/consumer electronic world, I’ve done a little in the regulated industries. My favorite was working for a company that reported to the Federal Railroad Administration.

How is a regulated environment different?

It’s different in a number of ways, depending on who is regulating you.

For example, you may be lightly regulated, as the rail equipment company I worked for was. By this, I mean that you have to track things like the big edit reviews and resulting comments and all previously released product documentation. Design specs after a certain point had to be auditable, as did factory floor policies and procedures. As did training materials used to teach people how to use the products.

Fundamentally, anything that was required to show auditors how the product and the product instructions got be the the thing out in the field has to be tracked. And, because this equipment was very robust, they had to track it essentially forever, as the products worked in the field for at least 50 years.

If a railroad crossing failed and people or property were damaged, the company had to be able to show the documents that shipped with the products, how that information came to be in the manuals, how the equipment was made, and how the end users were trained to use the equipment. For as long as that equipment was functioning in the field.

They had a lot of paper in a lot of file cabinets.

What they all have in common

Regardless of the industry – FDA, Financial, SOX, Solvency II, other government – it comes down to audit trails. You have to be able to show the trail of content that got you to the place you are right now. And that means history of content development in some manner.

If you’re using Word or InDesign, you have to depend on an external document management system and somehow track when and how the changes came to be.You must track versions of what shipped and when to who and why. You have to track review comments.

You wind up with a lot of paper in a lot of filing cabinets.

There are better ways

There is another way – you can track and manage the components in your content. Using the right component content management tool, you can use the history features to show you this information. You can also manage your review comments electronically. It’s a lot easier than trying to manage all these parts on your own.

To see how Author-it manages history and audit trails, watch the movie below.

Have you worked in a regulated environment? What were the restrictions you faced?

Long ago, when I owned my own technical writing outsource company, we hired a writer for a project. She reported to my project lead, who wanted to tear his hair out after the first month.

She couldn’t estimate how much work was left. She also couldn’t estimate how much she had done. We had no idea if she was on track or not.

This drove us crazy, as we had a content spec for the project and her topics were clearly assigned. We also had a hard deadline. But for some reason, she was at a loss to estimate how many topics remained before she was done. She was a great writer but this was surprising. How do you not know where you are in a project? How do you know you’re on track for the deadline?

Release states help you

The thing I like about release states is they help you see at a glance what content is in what state. If we had used Author-it with release states, we could have asked her to count the number of topics that had been moved to review and subtract that from the topics NOT in review yet to get a sense of where we were in the project.

And they’re customizable, so you don’t have to try to fit your specific content flow needs into what we thought they should be. Release states support your workflow the way you need your workflow to run. Release states are easy to set up and easy to use.

To learn more about how this works, watch this 5 minute video from our free Learning Center.

I recently posted about how much I like Variants in the new version. I thought I’d take a few minutes and point out another thing I like about Author-it, although it’s not new in 5.5.

I like that I can swap out a static graphic for an AVI video when I go to online publishing.  This lets me support my users appropriately for the output without any manual effort. I set it up and forget it. The more that can happen automatically, the more time we have to add value to our content instead of fussing with our tools.

Here’s how

You may need to create a new template for this kind of object before you start. If you need help doing this, refer to the online help in Author-it.

1. Add a graphic to your library or select an existing graphic. Open the Graphic Properties dialog box.
2. On the General tab, select the template you want to use. Make sure you select one that has both Print and Web selected in the Include Object In area AND has the video play options you want for the Web output.
3. On the Print tab, select the graphic you want to use in the print output.
   
4. On the Web tab, browse and select the avi file you want to use.
   
5. Click Apply and then click OK.
6. If you haven’t already, place the graphic object in a topic.
7. Publish each output and test.

See why I like it?

I’ve been training customers the last few weeks and so not as able to keep up on the blog as I would like. But, being in Author-it every day, showing various ways to make your workflow easier made me think a post with some of that might be interesting.

Feel free to add your own favorite things in the comments.

Variants in 5.5

We’ve had variants for some time. But the “fall back” feature is one I like a lot. Here’s how it works.

In Author-it Adminstrator, you need to either create a new variant or modify an existing one, depending of what you need to do. We’re going to look at an existing one – it’s called Version. Click the picture and then click it again to see it large.

The important thing here is the Browse button next to the Value list.

By clicking the Add button, I added various versions of the product to my library. I organized them in a hierarchy by using the green arrows in the upper left of the dialog box.

So, what does all this mean? It means that as I create new content I can assign a variant to the content. So, for example, I have an overview of the product. I wrote it for V2, but it  hasn’t changed in any of the versions since then.

But as I add content for the different version over time, I can assign different variant values to that content. Perhaps we did a bug fix/special version for a company and called it V2.1a.  For that version, we added some new content and marked it as V2.1a. All the content for V2.1 is in this book, plus the V2.1a content. But some of this content, we’ve not updated since V2.0 and don’t need to update – it’s all still accurate.

In other words, in one book, we have topics with a mix of versions assigned to them, using the variants.

So, maybe we’d like to publish the V2.1a book but we’d like to see what content goes in that version before we publish.

In Author-it Editor, we open the book. At the bottom of the list of topics in the book is the “Filter contents using variant criteria” list. If we click on that, we see a list of the available criteria and we can select one or more.

So, for example (click the picture and then click it again to see it large.):

What we see is just the content that is marked V2.1a and any content that appears in the fallback path, if there is no content marked V2.1a and any content that doesn’t have that variant criteria applied at all.

To make life even more interesting, I have another variant I call ShCountry. Because, in my example, we also now send similar but slightly different content depending on the country it’s going to. You can see that I selected Australia as the ShCountry variant and the ProductVersion as V1, You can see the topic marked with the V2 variant is lined thru. This means that topic will not appear in this output, if I select these variant criteria for publishing my book.

Because I can select to apply and select multiple variant criteria for my content, I can use one master book and then filter, based on the variants I select to meet my customer and product needs.

In conclusion

Well, I promised you several and gave you one favorite thing. The next blog post will be more favorite things. Promise.

One of the things I love about being in the high tech industry is the learning never stops. I’ve always thought having a job where you do the exact same thing every day sounds terrifically boring. And in the high tech industry, that really doesn’t happen – every day brings something new.

Training

We’ve added training to my list of things I’m doing and I couldn’t be happier. I love teaching people. I’m so passionate about this industry and what we do. I get to now also help people by providing them the tools to learn Author-it. Then, after the training, they are going to do wonderful things with that knowledge and change the world.

And I get to be a small part of that. Wonderful.

Towards that end, we’re doing several things at Author-it, short term and longer term.

Online training is free

In case you’ve not heard, we’ve made all the materials for our Core training available in small nuggets and it’s all free. If you have 10 or so minutes, you can watch a video specifically about what you want to review and then get on with your day.

This is a Big Deal.

If you want to add to your skillset and learn Author-it, you can do that with the Learning Center and an evaluation copy of Author-it. If you want to brush up on something – perhaps your company has finally decided to do online help – you can refresh your knowledge in the Learning Center.

Did I mention it’s free?

Already popular

Based on the stats, this resource is incredibly popular already. If you’ve not been to the Learning Center, I strongly recommend you get over there and check things out.

This has been a very busy week for the technical content world.

Author-it 5.5 is released

As you know by now, we released the latest version of Author-it 5.5 to great excitement in the industry. Once again, we’ve redefined the possible in the content authoring and managing world. For more details about what this release includes, click here and then sign up for the free webinar that shows you how the Author-it Reviewer works.

June 1st at 2pm Pacific. As always, if the time or date don’t work for you, sign up anyway to get a link to the recording the next day.

This hour long webinar is a don’t-miss event. We strongly recommend inviting your boss as well. S/he’s going to want to see this. Author-it Reviewer is changing collaborative work forever.

Author-it Learning Center

If you’ve been interested in learning Author-it, we have an option you’re going to love: free, on-demand training.

The Author-it Learning Center includes videos to help you understand the basics of Author-it. You learn what objects are, how to import and author content, and how to customize your outputs.

It’s all online, ready for you to view when you’re ready to learn. Each session is under 15 minutes, making is easy to find the time to learn something new.

Even if you know Author-it, it’s a great way to refresh your skills or review something you may have forgotten. What a great way to get the information you need and move on with your day.

The STC Summit Conference

And finally, this week was the STC Summit Conference. We want to thank the many many people who came by the Author-it booth to find out how our products can make life easier.

150 people wore Author-it tee shirts for the special Apple iPad give away. We talked until we had no voice, gave out chocolate Kiwi Fish, and awarded the iPad to Andrea Wenger.

A great time was had by all, as you can see in the picture below.

We’re really excited to announce the release of Author-it 5.5! Our guys (gender-neutral term here) have put in a lot of work to make Author-it even better for you and your content development workflow.

The top 2 things I’m excited about: Author-it Reviewer, and variants with a definable “fall back” path.

In this release we tackled and solved two of the most challenging problems in technical communication – conducting content reviews, and managing versioning and branching.

Author-it Reviewer

Author-it Reviewer is an exciting new web-based product that revolutionizes your content review and approval processes. Author-it Reviewer reduces the time for a traditional review process by up to 70% and transform it into a live, collaborative and interactive environment.

Using the latest web and social media technology, multiple editors and reviewers can work simultaneously in real-time, significantly improving productivity, accuracy, and auditing.

Additionally, graphs help you see at-a-glance the state of the reviews in your projects and what needs to be followed up with.

Other new features include

• Web Help enhancements for mid-topic jumps
• Support for publishing to Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0
• Multi-select importing of translation jobs in Author-it Localization Manager
• History improvements in Author-it and Author-it Live, including adding save point comments
• Acrolinx IQ 2.0+ support
• Author-it plug-in architecture extended to support event-based plug-ins
• Author-it Live user interface available in Japanese, German, and French

To see the new improvements

You can see some of the new features if you’re at the STC conference this week.Sstop by the booth and see what’s happening.

I was away last week at a client site, working with them on how to move to Author-it. They bought Author-it because they see the benefits, but, like a lot of companies who are looking to improve their workflow, they didn’t really know where to start. What would be Best Practices for them? How to get there fast so as to not interrupt the current deadlines?

They also wanted to use this move to better architect their content so they got more value out of what they have.

And so we started

We started with looking at the content they had and how they currently use it. They sell large industrial machines that are sold either 1) “as built” with no customizations, or 2) somewhat to extremely customized. They don’t do online help, so we just looked at producing PDFs. Of course, if they need to someday move to help, that’s super easy for them.

They had been doing docs in InDesign and Ventura and had to copy, save, edit, and rebuild every time a customer wanted a manual 2 type. This process took 1 to 3 days, not counting any new content development or any review time.

What they wanted to know was how to go about this process in Author-it. We walked through how to build a book and  then use variants to create the custom books. They got very excited that the 3 days of production would be reduced to less than a day.

Importing existing content

Then we started importing content from Ventura and InDesign to see what that was going to involve. It’s one thing to get new tools to improve your workflow, but if getting the content into the new tool is hard or impossible, that’s something else entirely.

The good news is that getting the content in from Ventura turned out to be super easy – we had the profile set up in under an hour. This is in large part because the docs staff had stuck to a short list of paragraph formats and didn’t play fast and loose. One of the advantages to a team that has been in place for many years is this sort of rigorous adherence to the templates.

The InDesign docs, however, are a different story. People in and outside the docs group created the InDesign docs. The adherence to the template was, well, less strict. We got the basic profile created pretty quickly, but there is going to be some pre-import work needed to put all the text in InDesign into one flow, instead of the adhoc flows it is in now, for example.

Changes to the workflow

Then we started looking at the workflow issues they needed to change to make this all work. The specific details for them are not important to us here, but the big picture is.

They needed to review how they:

• Import existing content – release states to know what’s been roughly imported, reviewed after import, ready to start publishing, and so on
• Develop content – what is truly new content and what should be reused, where to put content, how to know it’s ready for reviews
• Manage existing content – version, variants, release states, and so on
• Structure and locations of graphics folders- where to put overall graphics, product line graphics, one-off graphics, and so on
• Reuse content – what can be reused vs what is currently being reused, where to put reused content, how to name it, and so on
• Review content – how do they send out just the content that actually needs to be reviewed vs all the content in a manual, and more
• Manage localized content – they don’t do a lot but when they need to they need to right now
• Archive content and understand the history – what topics shipped in what manuals when? When was that topic changed and to what?

In sum

Even if you’re not thinking about moving to Author-it, these are all issues you must face when you move from one tool to another. You certainly can just start dumping your existing content into the new tool, but I think that many of the problems you had with the old tool are still going to be problems in the new one.

It takes planning and work to get the benefits of moving to a tool better suited to the problems you’re trying to solve.

I applaud this client for thinking this through and planning the change. It shows real maturity and that the CEO understands the value of their content.

I was really excited to work with this group and know they will be successful.

A visual

I’m including a photo I took the one warm-ish day I was there. My hotel was right on the Spokane River. One day was sunny and I took a long walk along the river to clear my head after a full day of intensive work. It was great. Being a So Cal girl, I don’t see many rivers. Ones with water, anyway.

(The client was not Kaiser Aluminum, I just liked the lovely river area with the Kaiser plant above the river.)

This is a short post, as I’m getting ready to visit with a client next week and need to wrap up projects before I do that. It’s been a rather frantic week.

But if you’re in Spokane, Washington and want to have evening drinks, send contact me and we’ll make a date.

Good news 1

Two new books are coming out about Author-it! I have specific information about the first book now and will share more about the second book in a week or two.

Learning Author-it by Char James-Tanny from XML Press is available this month. Char is a long time user of Author-it, Author-it consultant, and an all around smart person so this book should be very helpful as a reference to learning and using Author-it. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but we’re all very excited about this book.

Good news 2

This week, Paul Trotter gave a free webinar about his vision of the future of content development. We had nearly 300 people sign up, despite the day being Easter Monday holiday for much of the world. We knew the day might not be the best, but with Paul’s travel schedule, it was the only day we could get his attention for an hour.

If you missed this interesting webinar, click here to view the recording.

Lastly

I really hope to see you at the STC Summit in 2 weeks or so. We’ll have New Zealand chocolate fish to give out Monday and Tuesday, as well as interesting and informative activities in the booth.

Don’t forget the special Facebook giveaway – go to our Facebook page (Author-it) and “Like” the page to be entered into a special drawing. We have something very Kiwi to give away to the winner. You don’t have to be at the STC Summit to win.

There’s a lot going on at Author-it in the near future. We have webinars and are attending conferences. These events provide you an opportunity to learn, ask questions, and meet people.

Product webinars

We have several webinars coming up, some product-specific and some tools-independant.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in Author-it 5.5, we have several webinars available for you over the next several weeks. We also have a webinar in May about importing your legacy content into Author-it.

To sign up for any of these webinars, click here. Remember, we record these webinars and make them available the day after so if the scheduled date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway and you’ll automatically get a link to the recording the next day.

General webinars

We’re also hosting several tools-independant webinars. If you want to learn more about Component Content Management, we’re offering a webinar on that topic April 28th, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern.

Paul Trotter is sharing his vision for content development April 25 at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. This is also a good webinar if you’re boss doesn’t quite understand what content development is about and why it’s important in this century.

And May 11 at 1pm Pac, 4pm Eastern, we have the Content Trends Survey Results webinar where we look at the data from the survey and what it means to content development professionals.

To sign up for these webinars, click here. We also record these, so again, sign up even if the time and date don’t work for you to automatically get the recording the next day.

Conferences

Author-it is attending the STC Summit May15-18 in Sacramento CA. We’ll have a booth and several of our staff will be there (including me), ready to meet you and talk about how our products can help your organization. Additionally, Kirsty Taylor is presenting tips and tricks in Author-it Localization Manager at the Summit. This is a good way to see how a real user works in Localization Manager.

If you’re not at the STC Summit in Sacramento, then maybe you’ll be at the STC India Summit May 7-8 in Bangalore, India. This exciting event includes Saurabh Kudesia talking about Planning, Managing and Implementing Content Variations using Author-it.

We’ll see you soon!