Aberdeen’s research has found that organizations pursuing a content reuse strategy manage to reuse 41% of their content on average (The Technical Communicator’s Transformation , October 2008). Compare this to the overall 81% reuse rate achieved by the technical publications team supporting Hewlett-Packard’s Enterprise Storage and Services (ESS) division. The group, responsible for creating support documentation for all of HP’s server hardware, did not arrive at this level of reuse overnight. Tom Erber, Program Manager for HP’s ESS Technical Documentation department points out, “We have 20 different lines of servers, with rather isolated supporting engineering teams. A lot can change between two generations of a product. Even if the product name is the same, the only thing that might stay common between two models is the height. In addition, concurrent product launches makes it difficult to get horizontal visibility into content.”

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Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation

Written by David Houlihan from Aberdeen Group

On October 15, Author-it Software Corporation and Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. announced a partnership they claim will open up a new level of efficiency in how multi-language content is developed and delivered. The two companies have accomplished this by building an integration between their two solution sets that effectively creates a unified workflow for source language and translation content creation, management, and delivery.

Overview of the Partnership
The partnership takes advantage of the two companies’ complementary solution suites. Author-it Software Corporation’s Author-it enterprise authoring platform possesses a very large footprint in source language content development, including component content management, project management, and dynamic publishing. At the same time, Lionbridge Technologies has developed a comprehensive set of translation management solutions. Most notable among these are Lionbridge’s translation project management portal, Freeway, and their Translation Workspace computer aided translation (CAT) tool.

While there is some overlap between the two solution sets, each company largely starts up where the other leaves off. This creates a very natural fit for a partnership. Essentially, all the two companies have done is build a shared workflow between Author-it and Freeway. As source language content is created and approved in Author-it, it’s automatically progressed to Freeway and enters the appropriate translation workflows. When that work is complete, the newly translated content is passed back into Author-it to be managed and leveraged alongside source language content.

The Impact of a Unified Process
While this may seem simple, the difference a common workflow for translation and source language content creation offers is significant.   More…

Posted by Michael Lai, Marketing Executive, Author-it Software Corporation