Does Author-it Support Dynamic Publishing?

Can Author-it be use to dynamically deliver content to users based on security access? Can the users specify the output format(s) they want?

Example

An example of how you would use dynamic delivery:

Users of an in-house online information center can access certain features based on security privileges tied to the logon ID. You may provide a single User Guide for all users. By building the User Guide dynamically you would be able to provide only the content applicable to that user, at the time they request it, in the format they need it.

Answer

In Author-it information is stored as pieces of content. These pieces can be part of many documents. So you can create many books, one for each of your different security levels and publish them separately. While this is not on-the-fly, you still only update the information in one place for all documents and the publishing is automatic.

Variables would also provide a means to change out individual pieces of information for each of the books/security levels. When you publish these books, you place the books in different folders on your web server and use you web server security to prevent any unauthorized access.

You can also set the publishing to occur in a one off or regular scheduled batch process, where the required documents are published automatically at a given time. The Automatically Distributing Files After Generation article provides details information on how to achieve this.

Although this may not seam as elegant a solution as on-the-fly dynamic publishing, it is practical and will not require any additional server products, web servers, or publishers etc. You build the HTML documents with Author-it and simply upload them to your web server. We have many customers (including ourselves) successfully using this method.