New process for submitting your Author-it Cloud plugins for review

With the launch of Author-it Cloud more than a year ago, Author-it Software Corporation took the first key steps toward the future of collaborative, fully web-based Enterprise Authoring. Many of you have joined us on this journey, but there are also some customers and partners who’ve been unable to move to Author-it Cloud due to previous restrictions on customizations such as plugins and extensions. Today, we’re announcing a new process for getting these types of customizations up and running in Author-it Cloud.

To ensure the security and data integrity of the information you’ve entrusted to us, as well as the performance of the service for all our customers, plugin and extension developers will need to submit their code for review by our development team. Once approved, our IT team will upload your plugins and extensions to the Author-it Cloud servers on your behalf.

We will of course adjust this process based on feedback from our customers and partners, improving the process as we step through the first reviews with you.

For more details, please read the post on our DevHub blog: Getting your plugins and extensions into Author-it Cloud

I recently presented a session on Cloud Computing at the 2012 Society for Technical Communications (STC) conference in Chicago. At the session, I went into some detail on our perspective on Cloud Computing and also how it specifically relates to Software as a Service (SaaS) and of course, to Author-it Cloud. The key message that I was trying to get across is “Cloud is now and Cloud is the future”. Five years from now we will all be using some form of Cloud infrastructure and taking advantage of a myriad of SaaS offerings. There are obviously concerns. This is only natural as we go through such a step change in the way we work with enterprise software. Having said that, the benefits in almost every case vastly outweigh the concerns when viewed objectively.

North Bridge Growth Equity Venture Partners, a prominent Silicon Valley investor in Cloud and SaaS, recently released their latest survey, Future of Cloud Computing 2012. It makes very interesting reading and fully supports our position that the move to the cloud is happening and is accelerating. Some of their key findings are worth discussing in more detail:

• Software = Cloud – North Bridge found that SaaS spending growth is now six times that of all software. This growth is forecast across a number of software categories including CMS. This is a big change from the early days of dominance by CRM, eCommerce and Social applications.
• Cloud Drivers – In my presentation I spoke of the drivers seen within the Author-it client base. First and foremost was supporting globally distributed teams. The ability to scale to other departments was a close second. It is “Scalability” and “Agility” that wins through in the North Bridge survey closely followed by “Cost” and “Capex to Opex”. One interesting facet completely missing is allowing the business unit to be able to work independent of IT support and cost. Maybe this is covered in the “Cost” line of the survey but we see a huge amount of frustration from our clients managing On-Premises infrastructure and working with their IT departments.
• SaaS Rules – North Bridge quotes a Gartner 2011 survey which found that 84% of new software will be SaaS. I’m not sure of the relevance of this stat relative to a 2012 survey with new data. My feeling and observations in Silicon Valley is that this is a vast underestimate of the current state. It is hard to imagine anyone who is serious about launching a software business would not be taking advantage of the Cloud and using a SaaS model. Certainly I doubt that they would be funded.
• Public vs. Private Cloud – Understandably there is a growing acceptance through experience with Public Cloud. Scalability and agility seem to be the main drivers for Public Cloud, while Security is a driver for those using Private Cloud. Having said that, the survey points to a number of hybrid infrastructure options that allow us to take advantage of both Public and Private Clouds for various requirements. Just out of interest Author-it Cloud runs on our Private Cloud infrastructure.
• The Mission is Critical – The survey shows that the particular mission or application is highly relevant in a client’s acceptance of Cloud. Concerns over security and data sovereignty in certain applications remain. On all levels however the survey shows change in favor of Cloud. Those who perceive risk and wait for Cloud maturity (security and compliance) have reduced dramatically in number while those trialing and that now have “complete confidence” in Cloud has grown.
• The Gap – There was an interesting variance between Cloud vendors and Cloud users in the term “complete confidence”. Understandable, and the survey delved into the reasons for this difference. This is great reading as a SaaS vendor as it points us to the areas we need to work on to increase confidence levels in our service. They listed; incomplete value propositions, business benefits, case studies, proof, and ROI. I agree with these points with some commentary. I think the first two are a universal marketing problem and not just one for Cloud vendors. I think in SaaS it is important to focus on separating the Cloud benefits from the underlying business value that you are delivering with your service. In time Cloud will be a given. It is really driving home the value to those that sign the checks that matters. I really like the last three points; case studies, proof and ROI. These, in my mind, are what our prospective clients are really looking for to support their decision to buy. “Show me it working, introduce me to someone that you have done this for before and convince me on the bottom line!!”
• Work we have to do – North Bridge points out the factors inhibiting adoption. No surprise that Security and Data Sovereignty still top the list. Surprisingly even to my European colleagues, it seems that the EU is leading the way in breaking down national barriers and allowing a truly global vision for Cloud. Reported in TechWorld, Megan Richards, Deputy Director General of Information Society and Media for the European Commission stated, “You shouldn’t care where the data is as long as it is secure and meets regulatory requirements”. Continuing this line, Salesforce.com’s VP and Head of Platform Research, Peter Coffee asserted, “Data protection regulations based on physical location don’t make any sense. Clearly encrypted data with badly managed access privileges is dangerous no matter where it is, and well encrypted data with rigorous privilege management and strong mechanisms for auditing how privileges are used is safe,” said Coffee. “I could put an unencrypted hard drive mid-field in Wembley Stadium and be compliant, while the same data rigorously encrypted, but in Palo Alto, California, would be considered a grave threat.” Makes sense to me.

As a closing comment, the North Bridge survey shows venture capital investment in Cloud including SaaS has been growing at a dramatic rate climbing from $1.6B in 2010 to $2.4B in 2011. Investors by their very nature are forward looking and this alone points to growth in Cloud as investment money is used to improve services and launch a greater number of Cloud infrastructure and SaaS services. This is to the benefit of all involved; vendor and Cloud users alike. At Author-it we are very excited and proud to be part of the next wave of world class SaaS vendors and look forward to working with our current and future clients with Author-it Cloud.

Cheers

Steve

Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO at Author-it Software Corporation

To succeed, business decision makers need to be open to new ideas, while at the same time appreciating that standard processes are standard for a reason: they work. It’s a fine balance, and understanding when to look and when to leap can be the difference between growth and stagnation.

In my Death of the Document article, I talked a bit about accounting software and the way it’s evolved from the clunky spreadsheets imitating the old written ledgers to the clever SaaS software that lets users just put in their data and get out what they need. I argued that it’s time for authoring software to evolve in the same way – that there’s no reason producing a document shouldn’t be just as easy as producing a set of accounts. It’s a new way of looking at authoring software.

With new ways of looking at things, you inevitably get resistance.

Say you’re in business, and you have a problem you need to solve. What do you do? You get four people to come into your office and pitch you their ideas for how they can solve your problem. Three of them say they’re going to solve your problem one way, offering different flavors of exactly the same solution. The fourth says he’ll solve your problem a different way, with a completely unique, novel approach that looks at the underlying issues from a completely new perspective.

It’s pretty natural to want to choose one of the three. People fear the unknown, and when the boss looks back if something goes wrong, he or she isn’t going to question why you went with the safe option and not the risky one. You did it because it was safe, and safe is meant to be good. After all, it took more than a decade for the closed-innovation phrase “no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”.

Of course, none of this is to say that if people come to you with a crazy idea they say will set your business apart from your competition, you should start writing out a check on the spot. Some ideas are unsuitable for certain businesses, some are unsuitable for certain times or locations, and – let’s be honest – some are just unsuitable.

So how can you make decisions when the choice is a leap? I was walking past a cafe the other day and I saw a sign that said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. It made me think about innovation and how businesses can improve the odds when it comes to implementing new ideas. I realized imagination isn’t more important than knowledge, and neither is knowledge more important than imagination. Like a gun and a bullet, imagination and knowledge are interdependent – extremely powerful when used together, but entirely useless on their own.

When someone comes to you with a radical idea, you need to listen to it objectively, without dismissing it out of hand because it sways too far from the norm, but also without getting so caught up in the potential that you forget the practicalities. Then you need to think about it, applying your knowledge of the market and of your business. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how many people consult with their hearts and their guts, but not with their heads.

If necessary, ask the person to explain the benefits again, and confront him or her with any concerns. The individual who truly has a great product idea will love it – it’s like asking a bodybuilder to pump his guns.

It all sounds like a lot of work, but it’s the difference between a great company and one that just gets by. And when you hit on the innovation that’s not only exciting and fresh, but that it also makes sense when you stop and think about it, you’ll know you’re onto a winner.

Author-it Software Corporation – 3031 Tisch Way, Suite 500 – San Jose, CA 95128

© Ugur Akinci

The review process is always a critical link in the life cycle of a technical document. The process is prone to errors and riddled with frailties.

Especially when multiple reviewers are involved, it’s so easy to duplicate effort or override a change unknowingly. It’s a process that needs to be coordinated, with a built-in lock mechanism to prevent simultaneous reviewing by multiple reviewers.

To some extent a software like Microsoft SourceSafe accomplishes that by refusing to save a review if the document is checked out by someone else. However, SourceSafe does not automatically deny a review attempt if the document is checked out. It just denies a save after allowing the review to proceed, which means wasting precious time for nothing. So one needs to be careful when using SourceSafe.

Acrobat.com‘s collective review interface does a good job in organizing the review process and allowing multiple reviewers to read each other’s contributions and enabling the original author to consolidate all the reviews into one final copy. Yet Acrobat’s solution, just like SourceSafe, is not-integrated into the main editing software. You create your document on one platform and then submit it to the Acrobat’s server.

Author-it’s review functionality is built right into its single-sourcing platform. It’s integrated to the n-th degree, like all other Author-it functions. You can write and have your document reviewed by multiple authors all under the same “software roof,”so to speak, without ever leaving the program.

Here are some screenshots that illustrates some of the advanced review capabilities that Author-it offers.

It all starts with a clean list of all document in your document, listed by not only the name of the file but also the template it’s based on, late of last modification, version number, status, etc.

(Click to enlarge the images)

From that list, you can select a single or multiple files for a review.

You create the review by assigning mandatory and optional reviewers, plus authorized editors to the document. Notice the sophisticated review variables that can be assigned on the left side of the screen, like review start and end dates.

To insert a review comment is very straight forward, through the Suggested Replacement dialog box.

One of the really smart twists Author-it brings to the review process is the social-network like functionality through which the authors, reviewers and editors can comment back and forth about the proposed changes and carry on a lively dialog in real-time.

If you like, you can view all such review chat and comments in one screen.

In the final stage, an editor can accept or reject a review comment easily by clicking a button.

Author-it also provides a graphical representation of the review status of the document.

Reprinted by permission

© Miriam Lottner

Much has been said already about how great it is to work “in the cloud.” I don’t think there’s anyone left who hasn’t experienced the greatness of Dropbox or a shared Google Doc.

Author-it Cloud login page

So where does that leave the technical writer? We technical writers and documentation managers are long used to our love affair and possessive tendencies towards our “files” and our proprietary authoring software. A huge part of what gave us value was the relative obscurity of what we do. Transforming huge swaths of knowledge and information into books, with endless links and ToCs that update and indexes that contain links. One customer even went so far as to call what we do, “knowledge geek magic.”

What will happen if we take all of that away and author in simple tools that were built for everyone to use easily in the cloud? If anyone can log into our software, collaborate, review, comment and critique, will our processes fall apart? Will the magic be revealed as a fake? Will we be replaced by knowledge engineering robots?

I don’t think so.

A big hurdle in the last few years of technical writers adopting new and more modern documentation approaches has been adoption. Every new “tool” has been more complex, more IT heavy and less independently manageable than the last. There were resellers and customization consultants for every popular tool. Why? Because no one was selling a black box that would work like you wanted from day one, and everything seemed to require a level of sophistication to deploy that the average technical writer didn’t possess. On top of that, money was tight, deadlines were pressed and few companies had 3-6-9 months to implement and deploy a solution.

There are no more excuses. Cloud is here. It is fast, it is easy and it is affordable. It is also easy to deploy, requires no IT management, no infrastructure and allows you work with and collaborate with people from their hotel in San Jose, at home or on an overnight sales trip in Katmandu (assuming they have WiFi or an Ethernet connection). For all the same reasons enterprise applications are moving quickly to the cloud, so too are authoring tools and solutions. Author-it is the first traditional documentation authoring tool to make the move, and I applaud them for having the courage and vision to make it happen so early in the game. For small companies or those with limited budgets, Author-it Cloud is affordable and full of every feature previously thought unaffordable or out of reach. Say hello to enterprise level features at a fraction of the old costs.

So the next time someone comes and asks why you aren’t delivering your content like X or Y company, you are going to have to think a lot harder about why it can’t be done. It CAN be done, and for less than you think. The time for a move is now.

Reprinted by permission

© Ugur Akinci

Here are a few really cool Author-it features that caught my eye during a recent webinar demonstration by the company founder and CEO Paul Trotter.

Searching for Content

Author-it is a powerful structured-authoring editor that allows you to use the same chunk of content many times over.

So searching for reusable content is a very crucial functionality that needs to be performed well to be useful and practical. Boy, does Author-it do it well!

Check out the screenshot below and you’ll see what I mean:

The search options that Author-it offers are truly world-class.

Moreover, Author-it also highlights those files in the database that contains your search term.

Suggesting Content Relevance

Author-it also suggests the relevance of the search results by using fuzzy-logic probabilities. Content that looks similar to the selected text/paragraph are highlighted with colors corresponding to that level of probability (see below):

Highlighting similar content with Xtend

Author-it suggests reuse ideas by finding similar expressions in different files, listed even by their availability in different languages (see below).

Reuse content with Author-it Xtend

This is one mother-of-all XML editors that will certainly provide a competitive edge to those documentation departments that produce volumes of deliverables from modular and reusable components. No question about that.

As a professional technical writer I really like Author-it’s sophisticated features and I wish I could afford a permanent license to use it for my daily documentation work.

Reprinted by permission

© Ugur Akinci

I’m not a regular Author-it user but, having sat through a webinar presented by the company Founder and CEO Paul Trotter, I have to say that I’m impressed by Author-it’s new SaaS (Software As A Service) cloud platform.

Author-it is an integrated single-sourcing and structured-authoring editor. It’s integrated in the sense that you do not need to buy additional software to, for example, generate a help file from your source files, or create a PDF document or post your content to a web site. With FrameMaker or MS Word, for example, you need another application like WebWorks or RoboHelp to generate help files from your FM source files. In that sense, neither is as integrated as Author-it.

Author-it Cloud is an online service you subscribe to and pay a license subscription fee per person per month. There is nothing to buy and install.

According to a majority of the webinar participants (64%), the one outstanding benefit of the cloud platform is its anytime-anywhere availability. I totally concur with that. No more the rush back to the office to finish that critical assignment just before a deadline. You can hookup to the Author-it Cloud from anywhere you like and finish your work from wherever you may be. Author-it guarantees 99.9% up-time availability but “externalities” and “environmental factors” like a slow Internet connection etc. are not included in that guarantee.

Trotter’s presentation was pretty fast. The screens flew by at every click without any hang time. If that’s an indication of an average user’s experience, the cloud will rule — if, that is, you can afford it. At this writing the “professional” category of subscription costs $200 a month per user (starting January 9, 2012) and the “enterprise” level subscription costs $300 per user per month (Spring 2012).

The main AI portal presents a switchboard of available modules

On the left navigation bar, there are links to configuration options like Users, User Groups, etc.

Basically, you need to have a User Name and a Password to enter the portal through an Internet connection. In addition, as a user you need to be on the list of ACTIVE USERS. If you are labeled as an INACTIVE user by the admin, you cannot access the system.

There are two main types of Author-it subscribers: 1) Users (Writers), and 2) Reviewers. A reviewer becomes activated automatically by taking part in a review and again becomes inactive automatically by completing the review.

BENEFITS

Before going any further, let’s mention the BENEFITS of a SaaS Cloud platform:

• Lower upfront setup and hardware costs and lower TOC (Total Ownership Cost) in the long-run.
• Faster ramp-up time and implementation.
• Anytime-anywhere access. If you’ve got an Internet connection, you’ve got Author-it.
• Strong disaster recovery. If everything crashes in the middle of writing that million-dollar document set, you can use regular onsite (daily) and offsite (weekly) backups.
• Greater vendor accountability. When things go wrong, you know whom to call and blame. “You’ve got one throat to choke,” as Trotter put it succinctly.
• Easier hardware and software update and support since all updates are made automatically by Author-it. Nothing to download, or buy and install.

FEATURES

Paul Trotter listed the main FEATURES of the Author-it SaaS Cloud platform as follows:

• Performance is the main concern over the Internet. SaaS performance is said to be even better than the performance of onsite-maintained platforms due to superior system architecture, dynamic load sharing, HW optimization, etc. which are all taken care of behind scenes by Author-it. A well-maintained back-end assures a high front-end performance.
• Monitoring. Author-it says their systems are monitored 24-7 and alarms issued promptly at any mishap. The clients can monitor the status of their systems 24-7 through their portal.
• Scalability. You can start small and expand as you go along. Scalability is assured as a matter of fact.
• Disaster Recovery. As we mentioned earlier, all files are backed up both onsite (daily) and offsite (weekly).
• Availability. Author-it guarantees 99.9% availability in writing, by contract. “Or else, we pay you,” is how Trotter put it. External factors beyond Author-it’s control like the unavailability of Internet etc. are of course not included in that guarantee. Enough redundancy is built into the network through multiple network connections to prevent downtime. The “hot swap” feature provides real-time swapping from one server to another to assure project continuity without any interruptions.
• Data Security is provided by third-party vendors through a SAS 70 Data Center. Both the network access and backups are all encrypted. Author-it does not use “shared databases.” All clients have their own databases thus no one has any access to any other DBs.

The Million Dollar Question

Of course, the “burning question” when it comes to ANY cloud application is this:

“How secure is the cloud compared to its on-site equivalent?”

The question is a real one since in a cloud situation you are turning over all your database to the vendor. Your database, with all its proprietary and confidential content, will be sitting on the vendor’s servers. So you have every right to be concerned about the level of security that the vendor provides.

48% of the webinar participants said they thought the security risks between the two alternatives was just about the same. Only 29% thought cloud was less secure. So apparently this is not as big an issue as some observers think it is.

I personally cannot say that my questions about cloud security have been answered yet to my satisfaction. But I recognize this: just because something is on-site and sitting on a server next room does NOT mean that it’s secure. You can lose your data even if you keep it on a machine right next to you.

And secondly: this is exactly like how most of us probably felt when the microwave ovens were first introduced. Any new technology brings with itself an initial resistance, a sense of uncertainty which is usually expressed as a “security question.” But I guess with every passing day, as we get used to the pros and cons of the cloud and as more companies prove their worth with the way they conduct their business, we’ll warm up better to the idea, especially when we start reaping its benefits.

So at this point I’m looking at the “security question” as something that will become moot in the long run.

To view a recording of the webinar discussed in this Blog, click here.

Reprinted by permission