Using Author-it in a Distributed Environment

There seems to be a growing trend where authors and contributors are spread out geographically and working remotely on a permanent basis. There may be one author working at home, or a group of authors working in another branch of the company - sometimes across the country, or even around the world. We're often asked how this is best handled.

The best approach really depends on the bandwidth available and how your WAN is set up.

With good bandwidth, your remote authors could just use a direct database connection. However good bandwidth is seldom the case, and if bandwidth isn't optimal a reduction in performance is the first symptom you'll notice. As everything must travel across the network, it takes longer to create, to open, and to save objects; to publish Books; etc...

Offline Authoring works well in most situations as it is not usual for the remote and main office to work on the same content. Each office is normally responsible for their own area of documentation. Of course, creating an offline library using the direct connection is just as prone to bandwidth issues. What takes minutes in the main library, may take hours when working over a slow network.

For optimal performance, look at setting up a host machine in the main office, and from the remote location using a remote desktop access tool (such as Windows Remote Desktop) to connect to the host machine in the main office.

Note: Windows Remote Desktop, is a (free) XP facility so the host PC would have to be a Windows XP machine. There are a number of alternative remote desktop tools including: Terminal Server, Citrix, PC Anywhere, GoToMyPC, etc...

From the remote machine, start Author-it on the host and create an offline library. Transfer the offline library to the remote location via email, FTP, etc. Although starting and operating Author-it remotely, the application runs on the host machine so everything is done at normal speed. The only slow element may be in operating the interface.

An offline library is still a multi-user library, so many people at the same remote site can login and share the same offline library.
The process can also be scripted using command line parameters to automate the process and run overnight, avoiding any potential downtime for your authors while the check in and checkout is completed.

Note: Author-it's object-locking code currently relies on all client computers having their system time within 5 minutes of each other. Bear this in mind if using offline authoring across timezones, or Author-it may believe you have created or modified content offline before the offline library was actually created.