Hello, I’m Kendra Carter, an Author-it consultant and trainer here at Author-it Software Corporation. I’ve been an Author-it user for the past nine years now, and I have to say, I am so proud to see how the product continues to grow and expand its content reuse and single sourcing strategies. With the release of 5.2 and structured authoring, clearly Author-it continues to keep up with what’s next in the content management industry.
Speaking of keeping up, how are your Author-it skills? Would you like to learn more about using Author-it . . . for free?!
Attend a free Author-it training at DocTrain West! We’re offering a one-day Author-it basic training post-conference, Friday, March 20, 2009 from 8:30-5:00. This two-part training begins with basic authoring techniques and single-source strategies that make Author-it the leading product for content reuse; it concludes with training on our new, highly anticipated structured authoring option. We’ll talk about best practices for implementing structured authoring on Author-it content. We’ll first put our designer hat on and look at implementing structured templates using the new Author-it Structure Builder. We’ll discuss how to write rules and how to give authors helpful examples and tips on following the rules. Then, we’ll put our author hat on and learn how to create content based on structure rules and what steps to take to verify that content “validates” against these rules. Existing Author-it users—in case you’re wondering, you can impose structure on previously structured content! We’ll talk about how you can implement structured authoring on existing content and helpful tips for doing so.
This training would also be helpful for any existing v4 customers who are wondering whether they should upgrade to Autohr-it 5. You’ll get to see the new interface and it’s many features.
I promise you won’t need to know much about using Author-it before training. Just sit back and watch as I explain and demo basic Author-it functionality. Take the complimentary student materials and exercises home with you to try on your own time. And, feel free to ask any product-related questions as we go.
So, join me for our DocTrain West post-conference training. Be sure to bring your laptop if you would like to follow along. Here’s some more information on the session.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by Kendra Carter, Author-it Senior Consultant, Author-it Software Corporation, kcarter@author-it.com

We’ve been on the road fairly recently to travel around Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to present this year’s Australian Author-it Days. It was a great opportunity to come around and meet clients, prospective clients and affiliates to show what’s been happening to Author-it. I’d have to say though – I’m not built for that Brisbane heat!

Author-it Day is an overview of use cases and demonstrations with some networking designed to bring together the local Author-it community, engage them and add some value. We started off with some presentations of Author-it, how it helps organisations and what people are using it for. Particularly we’re trying to reduce the lag in uptake of new features. Clients get the opportunity to upgrade to our latest features and these sessions gives them a chance to look at new features and how to implement them. Author-it 5 has some really cool bells and whistles to talk about – namely Publishing Profiles, Variants, Quick Search and some smaller features such as Quick tables, Convert to embedding etc. This was a great chance for people to see how others are using these features and talk about what they could do.

We also looked at some different applications of Author-it as there’s a lot of opportunity for the technical writer in the organisation to take Author-it and improve a lot of other parts of their company. This is a reasonably common occurrence, where the tech writer might show the sales manager how easy it is to produce sales documentation from a single source or use Xtend to write bids and tenders incredibly fast. Shortly afterwards everyone is clamouring to get a hold of it!

Towards the end we had a sneak peek at what is up for release next year. Author-it 5.2 is currently in beta and there were some whoops of delight when Matt showed off Structured Authoring. The UI makes this incredibly usable for the writer and also from a change management perspective. We also talked about our new content viewing platform, Author-it Aspect that renders content in real time using variant filters and a new customisable user assistance platform – Author-it Assist. ’09 certainly will pack a punch.

One of the intrinsic values of Author-it Day is the networking. We want users to talk to each other and going forward present some of the very cool things they do with Author-it. Our software is very customisable – usually done by us during implementation but also done by some pretty smart clients and we’re really keen to see and share what you guys are doing.

But for now it’s time to wrap up ’08 and enjoy a nice 3 week vacation over New Years!

Post written by Richard Ashurst, Business Development Manager Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation

This post is a more ‘fleshed-out’ version of my response to a question posed by Gordon Maclean (http://www.onemanwrites.co.uk/), but the question is common: “Now that I know I want to, how do I move from an unstructured environment to a structured environment?”.  The Author-it team attend many conferences both in speaking capacities and as vendors.  We get the chance to talk to people from a huge range of organizations, from the battle-scarred people on the cutting edge to those who have only just started thinking about how structured content will benefit them.
The benefits of well structured content can be quantified very easily, especially when this discipline is applied to the broader organisation.  In almost all cases one of the biggest hurdles is working out how long (and how much) to get from where you are to where you want to be. Once the enthusiasm of DITA or custom schema dies down and people realize how much effort will be involved in migrating or re-writing existing content in order to comply, at the same time as meeting their day to day work requirements, the task has become huge and the true cost almost unknown.  Every hour that a team don’t spend writing (meetings, problem solving, struggling with a new tool, can’t publish the content, etc), every hour a developer spends updating a schema/specialisation/XSLT, every day a project slips, all add to the true cost of the project.  When management add this up the cost of tools is often minor in comparison.
According to our clients this has been the biggest gap – managing and evolving non-compliant Topics when the technology requires compliance to deliver an output – eg. the XSLT or DITA Toolkit chokes because your content isn’t yet fully compliant.  We talk to a lot of organizations migrating from Frame/RoboHelp/Flare (and even Word) and regardless of technology the big hurdle is the need to continue meeting deadlines while migrating from unstructured content to structured content.  For some it’s easier to draw a line under the current content assets and start from scratch.  This is a decision that effectively writes off all of the accumulated value of existing content – knowing this value, and the associated cost of migration, and deciding it’s cheaper to start again.
Not everyone can make that decision and so clients look for migration strategies that allow segmenting of content, evolution, and tools that support them during evolution.
In the 5.2 release of Author-it we’ve added template-based structured authoring where, once content is imported (or written), you can apply a DITA or other structure over the Topic and see exactly where you do and do not structurally comply.  Once your Framemaker or RoboHelp document is imported you immediately see which Topics are compliant and which are not, but you can still publish your document.  You can continue to meet deadlines and always have complete visibility of which Topics in which projects need to be updated to meet your structure standards.
The Author-it Structures are templates that can be applied to groups of Topics.  If you change the template, all Objects inherit the new structure rules (or show you they now fail to comply).  Workflow controls mean Topics *must* comply at certain Release States (‘Draft’ can be non-compliant but ‘Released’ must be compliant), and Publishing Profiles remove all non-compliant topics during publishing if you plan to use the DITA Toolkit or similar XSLT processor.
You can check out my short video on structured authoring

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