© 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

Those of you who have your finger on the Author-it pulse, or who attended Paul Trotter’s Product Management and Road-map Update in October, will have heard about one of the big new projects coming out of development. This project has allowed us to completely reinvent the way localization is accomplished and as a result, we’ve managed to make the whole process much more transparent, much simpler and much closer to how we believe you want to work.

Squashing the Pain Points

The biggest difference you’ll notice between the new process and the old process is that all your data is back in a single library.

• You’ll no longer have manage ten, twenty or even fifty different language databases.
• You’ll no longer have to run huge library updates to push modified data out to other databases.
• You can see all your translated content in a single place and flick between different languages as easily as changing a paragraph style.

The author can view their book in which ever language they want,  and it’s immediately obvious which content hasn’t been translated:

We’ve moved the heavy lifting back to the server

If you’ve ever logged in from home over the company VPN and kicked off a big Localization update late at night using the existing Localization Manager, it was probably the only time you ever made that mistake. The new Localization process has a slick web interface that means you can connect from anywhere and know that the heavy lifting is all going to be done on the company server, where it belongs. Where ever you are in the world, it’s now become easier to create, download and upload translation jobs.

Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the big difference

You’ve written some content, it’s been reviewed and it’s been translated. But you’ve just found a simple punctuation error* you really want to fix, without triggering a re-translation of the content. Previously, you would have left it, because it was too hard to not re-translate the modified content. Now you can make the change and indicate the translated content is still current.

*You may not fully appreciate this unless you understand why the sentence “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin” makes English Lit majors laugh. You just have to hope your translators haven’t been too literal with the translation.

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.

It’s that magical time of the year, when STC holds its international conference. This year the conference is in Sacramento, California, a short drive from the lovely city of San Francisco. A slightly longer drive from Southern California, where I live, but I’m driving up, nonetheless. I have family there and I’m spending a little time with them before I come home.

If you are at the STC conference and want to talk, stop by the booth. We will be doing in-booth demonstrations during the breaks, so if you want to see some new stuff, this is your chance. If you want to talk about what Author-it can do for you, several of us will be there to do just that. Paul Trotter and Steve Davis will also be there to talk about what we’re doing and what’s coming.

Do you want to win an iPad?

This year, we’re giving away an iPad. You know you want one – I certainly do. To get in the drawing for the iPad, we’re doing something special. Late morning Monday, we’re giving out special, limited edition, Author-it shirts in the Author-it booth. You want one of these.

We only have 150 of these shirts, many fewer than conference attendees. To be eligible for the iPad, you need the special shirt. Then you wear the shirt during the conference. At some point, we’ll select a person wearing the shirt and give them the iPad. You don’t know when we’ll do that, so it’s important to always have your shirt on.

Other prizes

If you miss the shirt, we have other prizes we’re giving away, including a free copy of each of the new Author-it books. You could win Author-it Success in 12 Easy steps by John Hedtke, or Learning Author-it by Char James-Tanny. We’re very excited about these books and think you will be too.

Blogging from the conference

I’m hoping – internet connection willing – to be blogging from the conference. We’re certainly tweeting and posting to FaceBook and Tumblr. Watch our social media for what’s happening at the booth, who is winning prizes, and more.

Good luck on the iPad!