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.

This is a short post, as I’m getting ready to visit with a client next week and need to wrap up projects before I do that. It’s been a rather frantic week.

But if you’re in Spokane, Washington and want to have evening drinks, send contact me and we’ll make a date.

Good news 1

Two new books are coming out about Author-it! I have specific information about the first book now and will share more about the second book in a week or two.

Learning Author-it by Char James-Tanny from XML Press is available this month. Char is a long time user of Author-it, Author-it consultant, and an all around smart person so this book should be very helpful as a reference to learning and using Author-it. I’ve not seen a copy yet, but we’re all very excited about this book.

Good news 2

This week, Paul Trotter gave a free webinar about his vision of the future of content development. We had nearly 300 people sign up, despite the day being Easter Monday holiday for much of the world. We knew the day might not be the best, but with Paul’s travel schedule, it was the only day we could get his attention for an hour.

If you missed this interesting webinar, click here to view the recording.

Lastly

I really hope to see you at the STC Summit in 2 weeks or so. We’ll have New Zealand chocolate fish to give out Monday and Tuesday, as well as interesting and informative activities in the booth.

Don’t forget the special Facebook giveaway – go to our Facebook page (Author-it) and “Like” the page to be entered into a special drawing. We have something very Kiwi to give away to the winner. You don’t have to be at the STC Summit to win.

Regardless of where you are in the world, we at Author-it would like to wish you a Happy Easter weekend.

For people in New Zealand and most of Europe, you have a 3 or 4 day holiday. It sounds like a great time to spend with your family, napping, or what ever makes you happy.

In the US, we don’t get any extra time off from work for Easter, but, as my Kiwi cohort mentioned yesterday, we do get Thanksgiving in November as a long holiday. For my cohort, the similarities are both long holidays are late Fall, early Winter for the local residents.

Something fun

As something fun, if you are attending the STC Summit in May, go to our Author-it Facebook page and Like us before May 17.  We’ll do a drawing in the booth at the Summit from the names who Like us and give something away.

Winner will be announced at the booth, on twitter, and Facebook. You don’t need to be present at the booth to win but if you are, you can take the prize with you right then.

Don’t forget the exciting webinar Monday the 25th

Don’t forget the exciting webinar next week: Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions Webinar, presented by Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO of Author-it Software Corporation. We have a lot of people signed up but we’ve got a little more room.

We will be recording this webinar. If you can’t attend because the date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway. An email with a link to the recording will be sent to everyone the next day.

Whether it’s Spring or Fall where you are, enjoy the weekend and we’ll see you next week!

There’s a lot going on at Author-it in the near future. We have webinars and are attending conferences. These events provide you an opportunity to learn, ask questions, and meet people.

Product webinars

We have several webinars coming up, some product-specific and some tools-independant.

If you’d like to see what’s coming in Author-it 5.5, we have several webinars available for you over the next several weeks. We also have a webinar in May about importing your legacy content into Author-it.

To sign up for any of these webinars, click here. Remember, we record these webinars and make them available the day after so if the scheduled date or time don’t work for you, sign up anyway and you’ll automatically get a link to the recording the next day.

General webinars

We’re also hosting several tools-independant webinars. If you want to learn more about Component Content Management, we’re offering a webinar on that topic April 28th, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern.

Paul Trotter is sharing his vision for content development April 25 at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. This is also a good webinar if you’re boss doesn’t quite understand what content development is about and why it’s important in this century.

And May 11 at 1pm Pac, 4pm Eastern, we have the Content Trends Survey Results webinar where we look at the data from the survey and what it means to content development professionals.

To sign up for these webinars, click here. We also record these, so again, sign up even if the time and date don’t work for you to automatically get the recording the next day.

Conferences

Author-it is attending the STC Summit May15-18 in Sacramento CA. We’ll have a booth and several of our staff will be there (including me), ready to meet you and talk about how our products can help your organization. Additionally, Kirsty Taylor is presenting tips and tricks in Author-it Localization Manager at the Summit. This is a good way to see how a real user works in Localization Manager.

If you’re not at the STC Summit in Sacramento, then maybe you’ll be at the STC India Summit May 7-8 in Bangalore, India. This exciting event includes Saurabh Kudesia talking about Planning, Managing and Implementing Content Variations using Author-it.

We’ll see you soon!

For most companies, the content they create is critical to the running of the business. Consider for a moment:

• Policies and procedures – state how the business is to be run, who does what and how. In industries with oversight, such as finance or medical, the business also must show auditors how the company has been running since the last audit. Failure to show this content can result in heavy fines or other bad things.
• Internal product documents – describe how products should work, the thought processes, the solutions, and so on for developing the products sold. Without these documents, a business has no idea how it builds what it builds. It also don’t know why decisions were made to do X rather than Y.
• External product documents – explain how to use the products to the people who purchase the products. If the external documents are not helpful, the business (at best) incurs an unreasonable support cost or (at worst) has a high return rate. Both impact available capital in the business. If the business functions in a regulated industry, it must keep the history of the external documents to show potential auditors how the product was described to work or potentially face large fines.
• Customer support documents – help internal support teams and external customers find a solution to their problems. For expensive internal support teams, quickly finding and understanding how to help a customer gets the customer off the phone and able to move forward. External customers who find a solution on the support site and never call is the ideal, as it costs the company less than pennies per customer.
• Training materials – few staff arrive knowing how the company works, what safety information they need to know, or how the products work. Training is how a company shares it’s tribal knowledge with the new tribe members. Many companies save a great deal of money on their insurance by making sure all new employees are trained in the required safety protocols. If the business needs to train customers on how the products work, the training center is a profit center.
• Marketing collateral – positions the products to the appropriate sales market. Few companies have a product so needed that no advertising is needed to sell the product. Failure to attract customers to the products negatively impacts the business.

Content as a business asset

The groupings above just touch on the broad types of content a business needs to manage. Even a small mom-and-pop store has some of the types of content listed above. For large international companies, the sheer amount of content assets, just as with hardware assets, for example, can be overwhelming.

Best of Breed companies know their business content is an asset that needs to be managed, just like the other assets in the company. Most companies track the computers and cell phones they use, for example. Annually, all the equipment is inventoried to make sure they have what they think they have.

Many companies never think about the business content as a business asset. The content that’s critical to the business is in Word or Powerpoint files or who knows, saved everywhere: on people’s local computers, somewhere on the network, maybe on a Sharepoint site. No one has any idea how much content they have, much less where it all is or what the most recent version might be.

If you ever wondered what Author-it products do, this is what we do. Our products help you manage your business content as the business asset it is.

In other news

We have a new line-up of free webinars coming your way in April and May. We’re really pleased with the offerings and hope you are too.

High on the list of must attends are 2 in particular:

Content Development: Future Trends, Future Solutions
Paul Trotter, CEO of Author-it Software Corporation shares his vision of the future in this hour long event. You’ll leave knowing what trends are and what you need to prepare for now.
April 25 at 4pm Eastern time.  To sign up for this tools-neutral webinar, click here.

What’s New in Author-it 5.5
Additionally, we have several webinars scheduled to show you what’s coming in Author-it 5.5. To see the times and dates, click here.

I’ve spent 4 days combing the results, compiling the statistics, analyzing the data and I’m finally done! Now other eyes can check the analysis and the numbers.

Watch our twitter account (@authorit) or our Facebook page for announcements of a webinar where we’ll go over the results in detail. We’ll probably be presenting this webinar near the end of April.

New media stuff

If you follow us on Twitter or on Facebook, we’re trying something new. We’ve combed sources we think are related to our industry and are posting links to stories and other items we think you’ll find of value. The response so far has been good. People are clicking through to the items.

This is something new we’re trying so if you have thoughts about the items we’re posting or think our Twitter posts should be different than our Facebook posts, please comment here. We want to provide value for following us and the right information where you expect it. We can only know if we’re reaching our goal if you tell us what you expect.

Additionally, if you have a blog, or know of a blog, that posts industry-specific (not vendor-specific) content, we’d like to know about it. Feel free to let us know in the comments below.

WritersUA

See you at WritersUA this weekend! I’m so excited about the Author-it Morning.

Well, it’s the end of the month and I’m not going to get these results written by the end of the month. I’m shooting for end of Feb now.

The white paper will go into further detail and analysis than I’ve done here.

But the last bit of data I thought I’d share is about industries. In no way was this a scientific survey so please don’t think this shows the larger industry of people.

Software is by far the leader in this parade. I honestly expected more education than we got, but that’s my own bias, I think.

In other news

If you have been wondering how Author-it tools might help in a Technical Publications group, I have a webinar for you.

Feb 2 2011: 8 AM Pacific
Author-it for Technical Publications
This live demo covers using Author-it in multi-person technical publication groups. See the tips and tricks to help your projects stay on track.

If you’re interested in this webinar, even if you can’t attend live, click here to register. If you miss the webinar, a link to the recording will be sent to you the next day.

While I’ll be showing Author-it, I’ll be focusing on workflow and larger groups and how it works in that environment.

Hope to see you there!

You may recall that we did a Content Trends survey in December.

486 people responded, which was amazing. I’m delighted.

Our winner is

We announced that if you wanted to provide your contact information, you would be part of a drawing. The winner would get either a free license of Author-it or a free training class.

We have our winner! It’s Shevette Chopin in Atlanta and she chose a free license of Author-it.

We’d like to congratulate Shevette and thank everyone who responded to the survey.

Quick overview of the results

We’ll be doing a webinar soon to cover the results and have a white paper available on our website. But here’s a few interesting facts that fell out of the data so far.

55% of the respondants currently use Author-it and 45% do not. I feel we have a nice dataset of users.

Publishing outputs currently needed:

And outputs seen as needed in the next 2 years:

There’s a lot more where this came from, but I thought these 2 were especially interesting.

Keep watching here for news about the webinar on this data.

Speaking of webinars

I’ve got the next webinar written and ready to go. If you are interested in the process of chosing a new tool or tools in a vendor neutral way, the next webinar is Monday, Jan 17 at 7am Pacific. Learn more and sign up by clicking here.

As always, we’re recording this so if the topic interests you but the time doesn’t work, sign up anyway and you’ll get a link to the recording the next day.

See you there!

Over the weekend, I went to my local office supply store to ship the Christmas package to my family in the US midwest. Before I left, I asked my husband if we needed anything while I was there.

“Why, yes,” he said. “We need pens. Good pens.”

“OK…” I said. “Maybe you should come. I don’t know what ‘good’ means.”

“Don’t be silly. Just get some good pens.”

Off I went. I got the package shipped and spent about an hour looking at pens. I finally decided a variety was the best solution.

When I got home, in fact, I had gotten at least one package of “good” pens. My husband was happy and so was I.

So why am I telling this story?

I often see on newsgroups or hear from people because they want to know the “best” tools for their content creation, management, and publishing needs. I’ve been part of several webinars lately where the question has come up. I understand why the question is asked.

But I don’t have any easy answer for you.

Defining the “best” tool depends on so many factors that the questions almost doesn’t make sense.

Back to pens

Taking an easy example, let’s look at the pens again. There are so many feature variables for this basic writing instrument:

• ink color
• line thickness
• gel, roller-ball, straight ink
• pen barrel thickness
• retractable or cap
• clip or not
• soft spot on the barrel or hard

I bet there are more, but these are the ones that come to mind.

Then there are the use issues to consider.

• Are these for work writing or casual use?
• What are you writing on?
• Do you have large or small hands?
• Is this going in your pocket or a purse?
• Are you likely to lose it?

And more, I’m sure.

So how can there be a “best” tool?

If choosing a pen has this many options to consider, chosing the right tool is much more complicated.

Towards that end, I invite you to attend a webinar that we are hosting in January that will go into deciding what you need to consider when you’re ready to consider improving your workflow.

It’s vendor-neutral and based on my experience as a consultant and a manager over almost 20 years of being in the field.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

by Sharon Burton