When people first started creating software to automate their business processes, it was natural enough to think of it as a kind of simulator to imitate what was already happening on paper. So in accounting, for example, you got these massive spreadsheets that basically just simulated the ledgers accountants were working with at the time. In its way it was marvellous because it meant you could use formulas to add stuff up and automate a lot of the work that accountants previously had to do manually. Even so, it didn’t take long to figure out that working with your data in its final form really restricted the way that you could manipulate and control the data itself.

From there you got the database-driven systems. These offered best-of-breed solutions in very specific areas, so you had your human resources programs and your accounts receivable programs and your inventory programs. But while they were really good for what they did, you had to integrate them all if you wanted them to talk to one another, and eventually you ended up with a strip-mall of products from all sorts of different places. Not only did businesses have to spend a lot of money on integration consultants but they also tended to get stuck with the basic versions of the platforms because they’d put so much work into integrating them that upgrading just wasn’t worth it.

The third generation of software was the end-to-end systems, which could take care of absolutely everything your business was doing in one tidy package. While these were a lot easier to get going, the downside was that the single modules tended not to be as sophisticated as the best-of-breed products. Still, that was hugely outweighed by the fact they were a single product, and over time it all improved and now the best-of-breed products have all but disappeared.

That brings us to Software as a Service (SaaS), which has of course changed the game completely. Because all the SaaS products have their own API, they’re very easy to integrate. So as a customer you have the freedom to go with consolidated systems or best-of-breed solutions, whatever suits your needs. It’s flexible, it’s scalable and it’s just going to keep growing.

So, accounting software has gone through those four generations, Customer Relationship Management software has gone through them, everything has gone through them – except documentation. Documentation has remained stuck solidly in that first phase, where we’re just simulating what we’d do on paper. Even when we create Web pages, we’re still just simulating what we’d do on paper. No one has moved past that first step into a more database-driven model where you can store content and produce a variety of deliverables from that same information. The format the document is saved in has changed – maybe instead of saving in .doc we’re now saving in .docx – but fundamentally it’s still the same idea.

In fact, we’ve had to develop software around the problem, like smart search engines that can search a document to dig out the knowledge that’s stuck in there. But that doesn’t solve the problem that if you make a change to that document, you have to make an entirely new copy of that document, so you have version 1.1, version 1.2, and so on.

The solution: an Enterprise Authoring Platform

Why hasn’t documentation followed the path of other technology? I think it’s because it just hasn’t been an important part of running a business. In financials the more information you have the better the decisions you can make.

But when it comes to documentation there are only two reasons to change: when it gets in the way of running your business or when it costs you a lot of money. What a lot of business owners don’t realize is that it’s doing both of those things right now.

It’s costing a lot of money because every time someone wants to create a new document they’ve got to start from scratch and hunt around for the information – information that may be written out 10 or 20 times a day, not to mention the time spent messing around with formats. It’s also getting in the way of business because people don’t want to work that way anymore. Take training – people don’t want to sit around for a week watching videos or reading manuals; they want to learn as they go, figuring it out for themselves when they can and looking for help when they get stuck.

So what’s the solution? A mindset change along with adoption of an Enterprise Authoring Platform (EAP). We’ve got to stop thinking of the document as a store of information and start thinking of it as a deliverable that you can produce from text stored in a pure state, in the same way that a financial report is something you can produce out of figures stored in a database. You have a user interface that makes it appear that the user is working on a document; but when they type something in, the system analyzes what they’re typing and offers suggestions for what they want to say. That way everything is uniform; you can make updates without having to create new files and the same information doesn’t have to be written out over and over again.

The technology is there – we just have to change the way we think. To fix the document problem, we have to kill the document. Starting now.

This article was originally published on SandHill.com

Running the ING New York Marathon in November last year was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. I ran for an awesome charity called Team for Kids, and managed to raise over $3000 to help educate young kids on health and fitness. So I would like to give a big thanks to all of those who contributed to that great cause.

The NY Marathon was the first big marathon I had run, and only my second marathon. I did the Rotorua marathon in New Zealand in April last year, and as you would expect for a newbie, made heaps of basic mistakes. But I learnt from those mistakes and changed my game plan for NY.

On November 6, 2011, I started the day by catching a bus at 6am from 51st St in Manhattan to the race start point in Staten Island. After waiting a couple of hours in the freezing cold the race finally got underway at around 10am. Due to the huge number of some 37,000 runners, I started off the race at a slower pace than usual, but after the Verrezano-Narrows Bridge things freed up and I set into my 5min/km (8min/mile) pace and pretty much kept that for the whole race.

I had been told about the crowds, but it wasn’t until I entered the lower parts of Brooklyn that I started to really understand what people had been trying to tell me. It was amazing, over 2 million people of all kinds and ages lined the street on both sides yelling, cheering, ringing bells, passing out food, drinks, and willing everyone along. It wasn’t long before I was high-fiving the kids and interacting with the crowd. This continued all the way through Queens, the Bronx, and back down into Manhattan. In fact the only place where there were no crowds was on the bridges, because they weren’t allowed. As I came down the final few miles through Central Park and up to the finish line the crowds really came alive, giving me the motivation and determination to finish as strongly as possible. I came over the line with my arms raised high above my head and a big smile on my face. I was targeting a finish time of 3:40, and ended up finishing at 3:42:45 which I was very happy with.

After the race I was very well looked after by wonderful volunteers at Team for Kids, and after a few hours of recovery, I headed down to SoHo with some friends to dull the pain in my legs with a few pints. I slept very well that night.

This Year Boston

This year I am running the Boston Marathon on April 16. Boston Marathon is the longest running and arguably the most famous of all marathons. It is the dream of most marathon runners to run Boston at some point. I am very fortunate to have got in this year. I will be supporting another wonderful and worthy charity, Project Hope, and I am hoping to double the amount I raised in New York.

Project Hope has for many years assisted inner city families to move up and out of poverty. They work with families every day to help them believe in their own possibilities and break through the barriers that keep them poor.
Project Hope fosters their journey through personal transformation and celebrates with them as they achieve economic security for themselves and their children.

The funds we raise will be applied to the agency’s core services: preventing homelessness; adult education and ESOL classes; training and access to jobs that pay career level wages; high quality day care; and providing emergency shelter services and ongoing case management for families in crisis.

This year the team is 20 runners strong and I am privileged to be part of it! In the past, many of the marathon runners have been significant fundraisers for charity. It is my hope that together this year we can raise in excess of $100,000 which will really make a difference to the many families that Project Hope works with.
You can meet the Project Hope Marathon Team (sort of like, “Meet the Beatles…”) by visiting this link.

My motivation for running my 1st Boston Marathon is is that I am continuing to strive for high level of fitness, setting a positive example for my children, my friends, and my staff, as well as raising money for Project Hope. In taking on this monumental personal challenge of running the marathon (26.2 miles), I will be continuing to raise the bar for myself by setting my goal of crossing the finish line in under 3:30.

To prepare for this year’s marathon I will be training hard! That means training 5-6 days a week, running around 50km /30miles per week (until Marathon Monday, April 16th 2012). As some of you may already know, the Boston Marathon is the most elite running race in the world. Numbers for the Boston Marathon are reserved for the best of the best! Therefore participation in the Boston Marathon is limited to runners who have run another marathon in a qualifying time based on their age (which I haven’t) and runners who receive one of the limited charity numbers available by committing to raise money for a charity team.

I’m asking you to support my Boston Marathon run by making a contribution to help me achieve my fund raising goal. Please use the link below to make an online donation.

Click this link to support my run and donate >>

You will receive email confirmation of your TAX DEDUCTIBLE donation and I will be notified as soon as you make your contribution.

Running the Boston Marathon again and achieving my goals really means a lot to me. I hope that you will support me in this endeavor. Thanks in advance!
The 2012 Boston Marathon less than 5 weeks away, on Monday April 16th, 2012.

This year I am RUNNING WITH HOPE!

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Alan Pringle (one of my personal heroes) has a new blog post that caught my eye. His main point is that “good” writing, for our users, may be indistinguishable from “good enough” writing. And I think I’m agreeing with him.

Close enough may be good enough

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to understand that actual people wrote the stories I loved reading. I married a writer. I teach writing. I read like a crazy person. I write creative non-fiction. I’m very pro lovely prose.

But, do our users care that we labored over that paragraph for 3 weeks to make sure it read beautifully? I’m thinking not. Especially now that social media really is opening up ways for users to support each other.

For example, I bought a wireless repeater for my home network a few years ago. Because this is a 60 year old house, while it’s not giant, it has some challenges. Including walls full of metal piping and odd corners and areas that I’d like internet availability. I’d like to sit on my patio in the spring and fall and work on my computer.

The instructions for setting up the repeater didn’t work. Just flat didn’t work. I did an internet search, thinking I could not be the only person with this issue. Sure enough, someone posted on a list how to actually install this repeater. And the steps worked.

Were the user-provided instructions lovely and complete? No. Were they good enough for me to figure out the rest? Yes. I was up and running in less than 30 minutes. The informal instructions were good enough.

So what now, if we’re not the Keepers of the Well Written Information?

In the world of professional writing, the writing part is really a small subset of what we do. We design information, analyze audience, organize content, and anticipate user needs, to name a few. Clear writing is important but it’s not important enough to define what we do.

When I teach Introduction to Tech Comm, I teach a lot about a third writing, a third managing your projects, and a third “this is what we do all day”. So, clearly decent writing is important.

But if you can’t deliver on deadline, the writing doesn’t matter that much. If you deliver incomprehensible writing on deadline, it also doesn’t matter much. There is a middle area that’s the sweet spot for all of us.

Including our users.