When you get a group of professional writers – or programmers, or project managers, or any one else, really – we love to talk about the projects that went south and the craziness that ensued. There’s a certain Can you believe this? that needs to be shared.

I heard a story recently. Names are not disclosed to protect the guilty.

Process=good

We’ve all heard that having a stable, repeatable process is a good thing. I’ve taught that you need one to get quality documents. But I was told this story about a process:

1. A person in the company wants content created (perhaps a customer has expressed a need) and enters the request in DatabaseA. That request is sent to Writer, who analyzes the need, and agrees. Writer changes the status of the request, adds his comments and sends it to Editor.
2. Editor evaluates the request, agrees with Writer, updates the request with the location(s) Editor wants to see the new content in the existing content organization.
3. The request is sent back to Writer. Writer agrees with the location and number of topics. Or Writer changes and sends back to Editor for further discussion.
4. Writer creates the shell topics one by one, by hand.
5. Then Writer enters these topic names in DatabaseB, including suggested index words, meta tags, and so on. Writer send the new structure to Editor for review.
6. Editor agrees or not, and approves or not.
7. Assuming it is finally approved, Writer starts writing. When writer is ready with a topic, he updates databaseB with the status of the topic and send it to Editor.
8. Editor reviews for language, conforming to standards, etc, and suggests or demands changes. No technical content is reviewed at this time.
9. The change request is logged in DatabaseB and sent back to Writer. Rinse and repeat until Writer and Editor finally agree.
10. In DatabaseA, Writer now marks that the content is ready for first technical review, including the location and name of the topic. This information is sent to the initial requestor for First Technical Review.
11. A process similar to, but slightly different from, the Writer/Editor thing happens until Requestor is happy.
12. Then Writer updates DatabaseB and sends the topic back to Editor. Because the topic changed and has to be approved by Editor.
13. You know what happens next, as it’s similar to what happened before.

Continue on, adding databases and reviewers until the content is considered “ready.” It can take months for 100 new words to appear out of this group. Months.

You don’t even want to know how this group goes about publishing content but I think we can all guess that it involves a lot of homegrown scripts no one understands anymore and a lot of machine time in some magical process that involves elves weaving straw into gold.

Did I mention they then probably localize the content? What are the odds that process goes any better than this one?

Bad process=Bad

When I was told this story over a beer, I shook my head and declared this to be the most broken process I’ve seen in a long career of broken processes. As a process, it’s certainly repeatable and has steps and all the other stuff we expect in a process. The most important point was missed, tho.

It’s a bad process.

Content that takes months to get in the customer hands is a broken process. It doesn’t matter that we have a process if it ignores the reason we have the group in the first place – to support the users. This process seems to exist for the sake of a process, which I think is wrong. It’s focusing on the wrong stuff.

It’s your turn

Pull up a chair and share your best bad process story. Don’t name names, just share the fun. Tell the story so we can all share in the head shaking. I may give away a t-shirt or something to the best story.

For several years now we have been selling our powerful web based authoring, management, and publishing solution, Author-it Live. It is extremely popular, and part of almost every enterprise solution we sell.

The challenge for our small to mid-sized clients has been that Author-it Live has been targeted and priced for our larger enterprise clients. However, everyone I have shown Author-it Live to wants it and are very disappointed when they find out it is outside their budget.

So… in response to your feedback we are launching, Author-it Live Small Business Server – a package specifically tailored for small to medium sized users of Author-it.

So why do you need Author-it Live Small Business Server?

• Want to increase your team’s productivity and collaboration workflow?
• Want greater freedom working remotely?
• Need an easier option for contribution by Subject Matter Experts and Reviewers?

In times where productivity and efficiency gains are of primary importance; anytime, anywhere access to Author-it offers substantial benefits.

What is Author-it Live Small Business Server?

Author-it Live Small Business Server enables authoring, reviewing, content management, and publishing tasks via your web browser. Now you can invest in an affordable solution that enables secure anytime, anywhere access to your single source content.

• Works in your web browser.
• No client software to install.
• Rapid, easy deployment.
• Create, modify, and publish content anywhere there is internet connection.
• Easily collaborate across multiple teams and environments via the web.
• Easy to use Web 2.0 technology.
• Supports up to 10 concurrent users. User licenses purchased separately.

Take a look at a short video I put together discussing web authoring, or for more information visit our website.

To make it even more affoardable and as a release special, we are offering to provide the first year of maintenance for free if we receive your order by Dec-31, 2009.

So don’t wait, contact us today.

Paul Trotter
Founder and CEO
Author-it Software Corporation

Posted by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it Software Corporation

One of the most striking issues facing our clients is how to extend Author-it’s collaboration further across their organisation.

The ubiquity of Word, PDF and email means these tools are a familiar, and therefore de facto, method to share and check content everywhere, but they offer poor methods for groups to collaborate.  I know Word and PDF both have review and collaboration features and I’ve seen some brave efforts to actually make these functions work.

After all, the thinking goes, if Word and Adobe Reader are on every desktop it’s easy to distribute a file and allow 50 people to comment directly in the document.

But this doesn’t scale – it’s a simple as that.  No matter how sophisticated your SharePoint system, or the forceful personality of your project manager, amalgamating and approving the comments from more than a few people is an arduous and error-prone task for the people responsible for managing the review process.  There’s either the comments from 50 people in one document (not pretty), or 50 documents with comments from one person.

So how to solve the problem? How to continue using a document distribution method that everyone is comfortable with, but keep the granular control and consistency that Author-it provides.  All without making the review process more difficult or timeconsuming.

We decided the best way to achieve these goals was to start where people are familiar (Word and PDF) and use this document as an entry point to Author-it.  That is, automatically create links to the relevant Author-it content directly within the Word or PDF file.

When a reviewer wants make changes or suggestions to any part of the document they simply click the link next to that section.  This opens the relevant Topic in Author-it for the reviewer to begin making changes immediately.

Because the review is now taking place directly in the original content source, all of the standard Author-it content controls, workflow, reuse, and release functionality applies.

The Word or PDF file no longer become the platform for collaboration, a task neither perform well.  Instead the Word and PDF file remain what they should be, a distribution and publication format, now with added benefit of linking directly to the original (controlled) source with proper collaboration.

As per I’ve created a short video http://www.author-it.com/videos/collaboration/Collaboration%20Plus_demo.swf to outline workflow and a few business cases.  Please check and let me know what you think.  This functionality will be freely available to all Author-it users but requires some scripting skill to configure for your own domain and database details.

(Just a summary for people unfamiliar with Author-it – software licencing is concurrent.  This means the Windows software can be installed on any number of PCs (the web version, obviously, doesn’t need installing on any user’s computer).  The software is smart enough to know who you are and configure functionality appropriately.  That is, no separate ‘review’ or ‘lite’ copies are required – if you are a reviewer the ‘advanced Author-it functions’ are automatically switched once you have logged in.)

Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director, Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

With a background in education I’ve been interested in a number of blogs and articles that have come up over the past few months regarding ‘open source collaboration’ for instructional material.  Anyone who has used a wiki knows the general idea: ubiquitous, collaborative authoring by motivated experts un-encumbered by geographic location or commercial constraints.  In some areas, though, a wiki is a very poor choice.  Its egalitarian nature, informality and generally more limited formatting becomes the other edge of the sword.  The ‘heat/light’ ratio changes and users lose confidence in the quality of information.
Beyond the hype of open source (Free software!  No vendors!) lies the real beauty – altruism and belief that information should be shared.  There are some amazing projects by universities to enable professors and industry experts to collaborate on curricula for a wide range of disciplines, from electrical engineering through to agriculture husbandry.  A baseline of material was provided and users can contribute, extend and filter to meet their needs.  Schools and universities are then free to incorporate this curricula into their own programmes.
Here at Author-it we have a large community of intelligent users that have taken the core Author-it software and solved some very complex problems.  We get to hear about it but the information often stays locked inside peoples’ heads or drifts around the user community as anecdotes and rumour.  So, in keeping with the spirit of open source we have made the (very purple) ‘Using Author-it’ guide available as an open source project.  Our own product Author-it Live provides the ubiquitous, collaborative authoring interface via a standard web browser, to anyone, anywhere.  With our long experience in the documentation and publishing industry we believe quality and accuracy are critical and shouldn’t be sacrificed just to get web-based collaboration.  Author-it Live’s controlled workflow ensures that all articles go through peer-review before being made ‘live’.
At this early stage a small group of users will be contributing articles, and this community will grow.  The evolving ‘Using Author-it’ guide will be made available online, and for the old school ‘curl up on the couch with a cup of tea’ people, a regular update to the hard copy will be found on Amazon. (update – the ‘Using Author-it’ guide has sold out already, sorry.  More copies on their way to Amazon’s warehouse early next week)

I’d be interested in feedback from readers about the strengths, weaknesses, joys and disappointments of your own open collaborative efforts…
Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation