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

We have an SDK available that lets you (or a developer) create plugins and other wonderful things. If you know what an SDK is and why you want to use it, head over to devhub.author-it.com and get your hands on it.

But not all of us know what an SDK is or why we should care. In a nutshell, it’s a way for your developers to make your applications work automatically with our application.

For example, if your sales team uses Salesforce, you can use our products to create custom sales proposals and Powerpoint presentations and have those connected automatically to the customer info in SalesForce.

I asked one of our sales team fellows, Matt Armstrong, to help me come up with a story that makes sense for those not super technical in the programming area.

This is his story. He’s sticking to it.

Why everyone should be excited about the Author-it SDK…  A colourful metaphor

Imagine you have a model car made out of those truly awesome Lego Technics blocks – it’s fun to use and does many cool things, but the individual blocks have been stuck together so tightly you can’t pull them apart.  And even if you could, there’s no instruction manual to show you which piece does what and how to put it all back together again.  There are lots of other people in your street who also have Lego cars.

Then one day the Lego head office posts every single Lego owner in the world instructions for not only how to pull the car apart and put it back together, but also what each piece does, which other pieces it works with, and how you can make new bits for your model car.

In the parcel, Lego has also included a handful of other Lego models, completely free, that you can use and pull apart and join onto your model car or make into completely new Lego models.  The instructions also tell you how to Lego can connect with fun toys from other manufacturers.

Fun times.

At first, everyone looks at the instructions and the new pieces and puts them on the shelf.  After all, the model car is already pretty cool.

And then one day your next door neighbour’s older brother is playing with a Lego boat he build from the pieces Lego sent him.  Even better, he can tow the boat with his original model car because all the model cars have tow bars, but you’d never noticed that before.

The next day your cousin shows you how he can remote control his Lego car from a cell phone and uses it to walk the dog.  He’s pretty pleased because he still gets pocket money for walking the dog.

A week later your sister shows you the Lego aeroplane she made using the engine out of the original model car.  It’s really cool and everyone in the street thinks so, too.  Your sister writes down how she made the plane and the next day everyone in the street has a Lego aeroplane.

Best of all, every couple of months Lego send everyone in the world a new engine.

So, that’s what an SDK can do

I urge you to point your developers (or you, if you’re good at that) to our website and have them get the download. They can do amazing things with it and make all your lives easier. You may be spending hours every week doing something that your programmers can automate in 30 minutes.

You can also create and release plugins for others to use. So it’s worth checking back occasionally to see what other people have contributed, or contribute yourself!

What things would you like to use a plugin for? What doesn’t Author-it do that you’d like it to do?

When I was documentation manager at a large company in So Cal, we had a lot of sales guys (guys here being gender neutral) who did lots of presentations. They were supposed to use the official Powerpoint templates and approved content but they did what they wanted.

Things got out of synch. They showed product information that was out of date on templates that were no longer the official designs. Worse than this, they also reused a lot of content so there was a lot of copy and paste between presentations but not between sales guys.

It got messy

Additionally, we had a training department that took our user manual FrameMaker files and pulled them apart to create the training manuals and e-learning. The trainers then created their own Powerpoint slides, with the same resulting issues the sales guys had.

This all looked bad to the potential and current customers because we lacked a consistent brand. And for a 300 million dollar company to show customers that we had no real process for ensuring a brand looked very bad. We looked like we were running the whole thing out of someone’s garage.

Worse, there was so much content that people were trying to reuse but the tools didn’t let us. So we brute forced it with the predictable results.

We looked dumb. And we spent a lot of time trying to correct wrong information.

This is where…

This is where I could tell you how wonderful Author-it is and how it would save your day if this is your current workflow. But for that information, read the rest of the site or request a demo from me. I have something small and exciting to tell you about in this post:

Author-it has a free plugin that publishes to Powerpoint.

So, you can write your user docs, reuse that content into your training manuals and e-learning, and get sales and training Powerpoint slides from one library.

No more out of date information or slide designs. No more paying people to waste time finding and changing all the places where you mentioned a feature that got pulled at the last minute. Everyone is working from the right information and the right templates, all the time.

This is a happy thing

This alone makes me very happy. If any of the tasks I listed above are things your group is doing, you need to look into Author-it. If you already use Author-it, get the plugin here.

If you need Author-it to do something that it currently doesn’t do, we have a new SDK that I’ll be talking about in another post later this week. It’s available now if you want to poke at it. Go to devhub.author-it.com.