Author-it has a new employee – me!

My name is Sharon Burton and I’m the new product evangelist for Author-it. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you and finding out what you want in our products, how you use them now, and showing you exciting things you may not have known about.

As part of getting to know you, I thought I’d introduce myself and then you can introduce yourself in the comments below. If we know more about each other, then I can better help you.

About me

I’ve been in the Technical Communication field for nearly 20 years. I, like most people, fell into this field and discovered I loved it. I love providing the right information to people at the right time. This field is always interesting to me and it’s never been boring!

I’ve been a sole writer, a documentation manager, a highly paid consultant, owned my own outsourcing business, and a contractor. I’m most interested in workflow problems the last few years – the How do we make the process of developing user assistance more efficient? stuff.

I want us to spend more time developing useful content and less time fiddling with our tools. Our value to our companies and our users lies in the content we develop and not in the time we spend reformatting the same stupid document for the 3rd time this week.

Other stuff I do

I live in Southern California with my journalist husband and 2 large young dogs. When I’m not working on Author-it stuff, I teach technical communication to undergraduate and graduate engineering students at the University of California, Riverside with my best friend. I simply love teaching these bright baby engineers things I want all engineers to know. Essentially, we’re trying to grow the engineers we want to work with.

I also occasionally teach for the Society for Technical Communication as part of the online certificate program. I like doing this because I’m teaching my peers and making a difference in the lives of working professionals. And that makes me feel very good.

When I’m not buried in technical communication stuff, I hang out with my husband, play with the 2 large young dogs, knit and crochet, design knitting patterns, ride my bike, write creative non-fiction, read, and garden. Occasionally, I do standup comedy, which is fun and terrifying.

It’s your turn

Now that you know about me, it’s your turn. Tell me about you. I’m so excited to learn about the Author-it community and what excites you about our field!

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

Welcome to the Author-it Blog.

It’s been an interesting journey working with our team to conceive, create and now deliver the Author-it Blog.  I previously thought of Blogs as the ramblings of people who ‘didn’t have a life’. They filled this void through endless hours of musing on subjects of great interest to themselves but of little interest to anyone else. So I did a bit of research; I looked at some blogs both within and outside our industry and ended up at the ‘source of all knowledge’… Wikipedia.

A few things stood out to me in the Wikipedia definition… commentary, online diary, network, and community. The ‘community’ aspect in particular tweaked my interest.

For many years the Author-it User Group has formed a fabulous part of what we are to the marketplace.  It provides an invaluable link between users. A place where they could share ideas, ask questions, provide tips to users and feedback to us.  It really is a community.

I see the Author-it Blog extending this community aspect by providing a medium for greater participation by our Author-it team.

The vision is a vehicle to open the doors of the company. To allow our clients, partners and prospects the chance to look inside Author-it, to meet us, ask questions and share ideas.

Commercial reality dictates that some of the amazing ideas and creativity that flows through Author-it sometimes have to be restrained, but I’d like the Author-it Blog to be a place where we can post our opinions, ask questions, solicit feedback and share our perspective with you.

While we are obviously biased, our perspective is born of more than a decade in the industry, tens of thousands of prospect meetings and over 3,500 client implementations all around the world.

I expect that we will challenge some of the general thinking out there.  Author-it has never been afraid to be different where we believe we are right.  We seek to solve business problems, not the symptoms.  To us the solution is always more important than specific technology fads or standards purported to be the only way to solve the problem.  In this, I hope we are able to stimulate debate and debunk some of the myths we believe exist in the market.

A blog is nothing if not read, thought about and responded to.  Your feedback is important to us and will help us improve this blog and its value to all.  Please comment on our posts, and if you feel the need, contact me personally with any additional thoughts.

Thanks and best regards,