With a background in education I’ve been interested in a number of blogs and articles that have come up over the past few months regarding ‘open source collaboration’ for instructional material.  Anyone who has used a wiki knows the general idea: ubiquitous, collaborative authoring by motivated experts un-encumbered by geographic location or commercial constraints.  In some areas, though, a wiki is a very poor choice.  Its egalitarian nature, informality and generally more limited formatting becomes the other edge of the sword.  The ‘heat/light’ ratio changes and users lose confidence in the quality of information.
Beyond the hype of open source (Free software!  No vendors!) lies the real beauty – altruism and belief that information should be shared.  There are some amazing projects by universities to enable professors and industry experts to collaborate on curricula for a wide range of disciplines, from electrical engineering through to agriculture husbandry.  A baseline of material was provided and users can contribute, extend and filter to meet their needs.  Schools and universities are then free to incorporate this curricula into their own programmes.
Here at Author-it we have a large community of intelligent users that have taken the core Author-it software and solved some very complex problems.  We get to hear about it but the information often stays locked inside peoples’ heads or drifts around the user community as anecdotes and rumour.  So, in keeping with the spirit of open source we have made the (very purple) ‘Using Author-it’ guide available as an open source project.  Our own product Author-it Live provides the ubiquitous, collaborative authoring interface via a standard web browser, to anyone, anywhere.  With our long experience in the documentation and publishing industry we believe quality and accuracy are critical and shouldn’t be sacrificed just to get web-based collaboration.  Author-it Live’s controlled workflow ensures that all articles go through peer-review before being made ‘live’.
At this early stage a small group of users will be contributing articles, and this community will grow.  The evolving ‘Using Author-it’ guide will be made available online, and for the old school ‘curl up on the couch with a cup of tea’ people, a regular update to the hard copy will be found on Amazon. (update – the ‘Using Author-it’ guide has sold out already, sorry.  More copies on their way to Amazon’s warehouse early next week)

I’d be interested in feedback from readers about the strengths, weaknesses, joys and disappointments of your own open collaborative efforts…
Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

It has been an interesting start to 2009. It is clear that the financial crisis continues and the world awaits the outcome of President Obama’s stimulus package to see how this will affect the US and global markets. As many commentators have hypothesized; while access to credit is a real issue, it is the consumer coal face where change will start. Changes in consumer spending flow through the entire business ecosystem from B2C through to the B2B sector.

So in a market such as this, how do you drive forward?

I think the answer to this question lies in how businesses are affected and are subsequently seeking to deal with the crisis. The effects are first felt in a reduction in sales revenues. This is a natural market reaction to a crisis – ‘hunker down’ mentality. This leads to additional emphasis on sales execution and a review of costs.

At Author-it we have been heavily focused on these issues in our client and prospect discussions. That is; how can Author-it help our clients with sales execution and how can we cut their costs? Obviously there is an investment to be made in purchasing and implementing Author-it, so we have been ruthless in presenting our case for real dollar cost savings above other gains. Here’s some scenarios to illustrate this point:

Issue: Authoring teams (of all persuasions) are under significant pressure. Teams are being asked to do more with less people and still expected to complete projects on time.
Solution: Author-it allows 40% + gains in authoring efficiency through advanced reuse, single sourcing and multi-output publishing. More output from less.

Issue: Authoring teams are becoming a distributed mix of permanent employees and contractors. This makes collaboration, authoring, edit review and approval very difficult.
Solution: Author-it Live allows web based, ‘anywhere, anytime access’ to content for authoring, review and publishing. Huge time and efficiency gains.

Issue: Localization budgets are under pressure but there is still a requirement to sell in global markets and therefore deliver localized content.
Solution: Author-it Localization Manager can cut localization costs by more than 50%. This is a real cash saving.

Issue: Sales teams need to produce more revenue. This means more sales proposals and therefore more administrative load.
Solution: A number of clients (and us of course) use Author-it to generate custom sales proposals at a small fraction of the time and effort required using traditional methods. This means better quality, compliant proposals and an increased chance of sales success.

Issue: Authoring applications are siloed meaning it is difficult or impossible to leverage content assets across an enterprise.
Solution: Author-it is an enterprise authoring and content management application. Its ease of use and intuitive UI means it can be used by all business units allowing content to be shared and reused throughout an enterprise. Huge efficiency gains across the enterprise.

The above scenarios focus on addressing the core issues many companies are experiencing right now that is how to; cut costs and increase revenue. I believe it is by focussing on ROI and these key areas that both software purchasers and vendors can come together and mutually work through the worst effects of the current market.

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #5: Fear of Obsolescence
Another people challenge is personality problems with individuals who’ve played crucial roles because of their expertise. The one person everyone comes to when they have a problem, for example.

Once a CMS has been implemented, that person is generally not relied upon so much anymore because work isn’t performed in the same fashion.  So there can be issues from people who feel a growing obsolescence as their power base erodes.

How is this obstacle overcome? The fact is, many times it’s not.  Often, these people must be left behind in order for a better system to take hold.  Other times, however, it is possible to make the person ‘indispensable’ in a different area.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organizations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #4: The People Factor
In our experience, the main competitor for a CMS is not really another vendor, it’s apathy.   Often, people who use MS Word to create their documents are comfortable using it and don’t care enough to try anything else – even if another program is more suitable for managing content.

The only areas of the company for which change is desirable are those where the pain of creating and managing content is particularly strong, such as product documentation – driven by deadlines, quality and other factors which typically don’t affect many other departments. Sometimes the opposite is true.

Executives frequently ask how the CMS can help on a more companywide basis, while writers wonder how it can help them specifically.  Often the true benefits of a CMS are realised downstream from the actual writing (workers from different departments drawing on each other’s work, greater consistency and efficiency).  Getting writers to alter the way they work purely for the sake of others can be a hard road to hoe.  In the end, the CMS is a two-part sell: the CMS vendor must demonstrate value to the organisation at large and to the individual as well.  It’s critical that every person in the process sees some improvement in the way they work.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #3: Gaining Approval
The approval process for a CMS is an all-too-familiar barrier. While budget concerns might be raised the real obstacle is convincing people that there’s a good business case for a CMS.

Often it’s a generational issue: many older executives simply don’t see the value of managing information and the only types of arguments that are considered involve hard ROI.

Sometimes this is readily evident (where there is a high volume of customer-facing content), but if the issue is just making life easier, gaining internal approval can be difficult.

The answer?  Obviously, where there is a good deal of customer facing content or translation, the case can be made easily. But where neither item is a factor, the case should be made through the value of producing content that is consistent, graphically uniform, and ultimately quicker to create.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #2: Migration
Migrating an enterprise’s existing information into this new format, requires a big investment in time and labour as the sheer volume of content is overwhelming in comparison to what it would have been 20 years ago at the time financial information was being converted.

And as this content represents 80% of an organisation’s data, the importance of the migration phase cannot be overestimated. In the end, migration requires a technology solution with some CMS’s more adept at allowing people to import content quickly, and in popular formats. Unfortunately, successful migration involves other factors, specifically the formatting of the original document. The less structured a document, the more difficult it is to import it into the CMS.For example, a manual created by a writer in the technical publications department will be relatively straightforward, since most technical writers are meticulous about style and formatting. But a manual written by a different department may present a different set of issues. We’ve seen documents created by HR, for instance, in which the writer came to the end of a line, hit the Return key, and then used the spacebar to line up the next paragraph.

Importing a manual with this lack of style involves much more labour and effort. CMS vendors without advanced migration capabilities may well propose that a company simply create all new content. But having already invested millions of dollars in their content, organisations cannot be expected to give it up lightly.

Of course, many of the same vendors are willing to provide migration assistance at a substantial cost – sometimes as much as $15 a page. One way around this is to migrate only the content that is absolutely necessary. Ie: don’t migrate manuals for products that are no longer manufactured or for procedures that have been discarded. The amount of content that can be left on the side of the road is often quite voluminous.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation.

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

The term ‘double-edged sword’ may have been created with content management systems (CMS) in mind. On one edge, they hold great promise for organisations in terms of their ability to create and manage content that is more accurate, less costly to produce, and more consistent in appearance. On the other, they can present a myriad of challenges in their implementation and acceptance by the people using them – and purchasing them. Let’s examine the challenges that a CMS presents, along with ways those challenges can be overcome…

Challenge #1: Control & Management
Perhaps the primary challenge with managing content (which, for the purposes of this article, is defined as an organisation’s ‘human readable’ information, representing about 80% of a company’s total information base), is that there’s little or no control around creating it in the first place. Content is produced by a range of people at every level of an organisation, with usually no control mechanisms over it.

Another issue is the way content has been managed over the years. A good example is financial information. Years ago people wrote their financials longhand on paper, then in ledgers. This was followed by spreadsheet software, which simulated the written ledger in the way it looked.

Soon thereafter, the 2nd generation of software arrived which allowed users to manipulate the information more creatively, followed by sophisticated financial management software. This evolution of systems for financial information, which took place some 15-20 years ago, has not taken place for other content. In fact the majority of common tools to create content (e.g., Word, Frame, etc.) have never moved from the paper simulation stage.

Word processors essentially replicated the function of typewriters, and while they have become more visual and feature-rich they’re fundamentally still doing the same thing: storing information as linear documents. CMS’s have been instrumental in moving content creation out of the paper simulation phase into the database stage, which can’t be duplicated in a paper format. Basically, it’s a revolution in the way content is managed and mirrors the evolution of financial software.

Posted by Paul Trotter, CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

Recently I’ve noticed that not only within the pages of this blog, but in CMS blog-space in general there are a handful of commonly used acronyms that are bandied about with the assumption that all readers automatically understand what they mean, not only literally but also what technologies and processes they actually represent.

Another twist to this is is that even within the content management community, there isn’t always agreement. Here is my humble attempt at bringing some clarity to the subject.  My thanks go to Wikipedia and Peter Halgopan of Information Week for help with definitions.

CM or CMS – Content Management  or Content Management System.  This a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion.  CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files, electronic documents, and Web content.

CCMS – Component Content Management System.  Content Management applications which break down authored content into granular components (‘topics’).  Core components of such content, can then be reused in many content products.  Research shows that as much as half of product support content is redundant and could be reused. For a large organization, reuse can yield significant savings, efficiencies, and quality improvements over time.  A core component can be something as small as a legal copyright statement, the first steps in a process that are shared by many processes, or an key branding message like a product name or tagline. Reuse allows the core component to be edited and maintained from a single source, and then be easily assembled into thousands of documents where it is needed.

WCM or WCMS – Web Content Management or Web Content Management System.  Content management system software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages to create and manage content with relative ease.. Blogging tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Movable Type are examples of WCM tools.

DM or DMS – Document Management or Document Management System. A computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. Some DM systems also have tools to help support workflow. The term has some overlap with the concepts of Content Management Systems and is often viewed as a component of Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM) and related to Digital Asset Management, Document imaging, Workflow systems and Records Management systems. Contract Management and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) can be viewed as either components or implementations of ECM. DM systems are particularly good for organizations with a high volume of documentation that needs to be easily searchable, as well as organizations that have to comply with regulatory restrictions.

DAM – Digital Asset Management covers content and files of every type, including images, video and audio files, MS Office files, in fact just about anything that can be digitized. DAM usually refers to a hardware/software system that helps to store and manage these digitized files. The term “Digital Asset Management” also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, backing up, rating, grouping, archiving, optimizing, maintaining, thinning, and exporting files.  Occasionally the term “Visual Asset Management” (VAM) is used, especially in the FMCG space.

MAM – The term “Media Asset Management” is sometimes used as a sub-category of “Digital Asset Management”, mainly for audio or video content.

ECM – Enterprise Content Management tends to be a bit of a all-encompassing concept but generally refers to systems that include content management and digital asset management components. ECM systems are usually fairly expensive and hardware intensive, and often require a significant level of IT experience to set up and run. The “official” definitions as set by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) is “Enterprise Content Management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

The major differences between CMS and ECM? The CMS definition specifically mentions software; it’s a software system (or systems) for a the specific use of managing and publishing content, whereas the ECM definition refers to both tools and strategies.

I’m sure we are just scratching the surface here, so I’d be grateful if anyone can give deeper meaning to any of the above, or indeed add to the list.

Posted by Dunken Francis,  Web Consultant, Author-it Software Corporation

As I mentioned before, we are planning to migrate content from FrameMaker to Author-it, staging the migration across two different product sets (and no small amount of time!). I’m in the process of evaluating Author-it for, despite having used it before, it has recently been overhauled with a spiffy new UI and some new features.

Author-it is a single source system, with content stored in a central database, which can publish to most (all?) of the formats that anyone would ever need. It includes an editor, supports multiple users, and has some additional add-ons for localization and so on. Their website is very good if you want more information on their product.

After downloading and installing the trial version, which limits your import and publishing but otherwise has all the features available for use, I fired it up and was greeted with the new interface. Based on the ribbons used in the latest version of Microsoft Office, it is quite a shift away from the previous version and it took me a while to get to grips with. However it is a huge improvement over the old version and once you are used to it, like anything, it’s very nice to use. Yes I know there are still issues being dealt with, but I didn’t run across that many during my testing, so I’m happy.

During my evaluation I spoke to their Business Development Manager who was very helpful in delving into some of the issues I had around versioning and set my mind at rest. I’ll outline how we are going to handle maintaining multiple versions of documents in another post, once I’ve given it a dry run or two.

One issue that cropped up was the location and format of the supporting database. You can run Author-it on a Jet database either locally or on a network drive although that is particularly performant, or run it on a SQL Server. As we are a small team I did consider the Jet database but our situation suggests a server database would be better. Which introduced another problem, price. SQL Server isn’t the cheapest and we don’t have an installation in-house. Thankfully one of our IT guys suggested SQL Express (a limited free version of SQL Server) as a possibility, and after a quick check on the Author-it Yahoo Group, I’ve found that it will run quite happily on that database.

There is a limit of 4GB on the database size but as long as we keep our images elsewhere there is little chance we’ll hit that limit. Our total content at present, including images, tops out under 500MB for one version of the documentation. So we’ll actually be saving space on a server as we won’t be maintaining multiple versions of entire documents. Must remember to point that out to our IT guys!

Aside from versioning the only feature I was unfamiliar with was the batch runner, which allows you to run a batch file (.bat) as a scheduled task. Our current system runs at night, using Webworks to create a Javahelp file which is then included in the software build and Author-it will give us similar functionality.

Why Author-it? Well, quite simply it gives us what we need.

I spent some time at the X-Pubs conference last year, and throughout the presentations the underlying message was “get your requirements sorted before hunting for a system”. The premise is obvious enough, if you decide on a system first, you end up shoe-horning your processes around how it works rather than getting a system that works you way YOU work.

I also spent some time considering DITA but ultimately switching to an XML-based system is still too cost-prohibitive. Author-it is a compromise, allowing us to work how we want to work, whilst giving us single source benefits. We will use DITA as a framework for how we plan and write the content, but the simple fact is that Author-it is a much better value proposition than a bespoke system, both in monetary and resource terms. This makes the business case much easier to sell.

If you are considering single sourcing your content, then I’d strongly suggest you investigate Author-it as a possibility. It has limitations, including the oft-cited reliance on Word as a publishing engine, but for me the advantages outweight those.

And no, I am not being paid to endorse Author-it.

Published with permission from Gordon McLean’s “OneManWrites” blog