© 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

While I’ve spent my career in the software/consumer electronic world, I’ve done a little in the regulated industries. My favorite was working for a company that reported to the Federal Railroad Administration.

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?

I’ve been thinking about the use of social media and technology recently. We’ve known for years that people want the information they need to get on with things, whether it’s installing the new Blue-ray player or completing the vacation form for work. No one wants to read an 80 page document, complete with cross references and footnotes. Life is short and full of other things.

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.

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.

Fast update before I get ready for the conference today.

Opening night

Last night, the STC Summit officially opened. The show floor was crazy busy and I think I met nearly everyone who is at the conference. Our booth was flooded with people!

We explained the iPad give away and handed out flyers. Today, I expect we’ll be flooded again. I can’t wait.

The iPad give away

While STC is giving away an iPad, so are we. Here’s how you get in the drawing:

1. About 11am today, come to our booth and watch the demo of the new Reviewer.
2. Get a limited edition t-shirt. We only have 150 of them – far fewer than the conference attendees.
3. Wear your shirt during the conference.
4. At some point, we’ll grab someone wearing the shirt and they win the iPad on the spot.

That’s it! That’s all you have to do.

So, we’ll see you all in the booth!