Author gives me great help in managing documentation. It helps me in managing the translations of my manuals. With few click i have the documents ready to publish in PDF format. I use this cloud every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I found some difficulties and problems at the beginning. The layout is not easier and the manuals in PDF format are too big. When i insert images is a slow process and is not possible manage the jpg or png inside the cloud. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We are using the On Premises version.

We can organize our work inside of Author-it using release sates and internal comments.

Once you have setup your output formats you can fully conentrate on your content.

When you have understood the concept of Author-it, then you have a very flexible and powerful tool.

For writers or reviewers only, it is easy to learn and they like it.

Author-it has a quick and competent support.

It is very stable we had since nearly 20 years of use no problems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The cloud version is too expensive.

The handling of tables. A table object would be very helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A learning curve but their training is great. Best is the ability to reuse text. if you are writing a new document that is 80% like another product, your work is 80% done. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We output to MSWord and then make a PDF. We have to do the page breaks manually. The parts component is added in Word before making the PDF. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The easy of use of Author-it for people that have little understanding of writing and publication. For example we have a mechanic from our assembly line writing assembly instructions. I take him only four sessions of approximately 2 hours and he was up and running. It took me as an experience Author-it user approximately one week to setup the work environment, templates and publication process so that it was easy to use for non-experienced-writers.

It is easy to create user-groups and limit what every user sees when working with Author-it. We have roles for Operator Manuals, Marketing Information and Factory Instructions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As an administrator I see everything in the system and that is sometimes a bit annoying, for example when I need to write content for operator manuals. If I only want to see operator information I have to switch of views manually. That is however only my problem, all other users have been specified and see only the information that is relevant for their tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Author-It is superior when it comes to managing large amounts of complex, single-sourced content. It easily handles variations to content, and the UI is intuitive. I know that whatever content-management challenges that come up, Author-It will handle them. The support I receive from the Service Desk is second-to-none. They get back to you quickly, and genuinely care about your question or issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First, Author-It needs to offer more online formats to publish out to. At the time of writing (August 2019) they offer mostly legacy formats like WebHelp and HTML Help. I have had to heavily customise my CSS to improve the look and feel and behaviour of my WebHelp output. But I would like to see HTML5 formats on offer soon. I want to easily be able to publish modern, responsive HTML5 content. I want my help to have decent search, and I want to be able to embed metadata inside each content object. I want it to look less like the early 2000s. I know that the company is working hard to make this possible, so I look forward to seeing what they offer in the next 12 months.

Second, there is a huge learning curve for new users. Honestly, I almost had a breakdown learning it. The configuration and relationship between the foundation objects that make the whole thing wor is complex. I fully document all of my config wherever I implement the system so I can remember what the hell it all means.

Third, the output to MS Word is OK but requires quite a bit of mop-up to make your printed output look good. I like my documents to look perfect so if you can live with a little weirdness, then you might not think this is a big deal. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

no more searching for files or images, quick finds trough locate option Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No more endless debates about why old recently updated content came back in other manuals dye to copy/paste. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Heather :-) and the whole team also in Europe. Always helpful and friendly. Author-it with Localise is a powerful Single-Source-Publishing software for all our belongings: Creating Help systems and pdf documentation, importing Release Notes from word and creating an extra help system for Release Notes, Preparing translations into several languages with localise and exporting them to/importing them from out Translation Memory System and monitoring the statuses by using release states. Because we are specialised ware documentation we especially like the object-oriented workflow as it is also in development tools. Also that the data is hold in SQL makes the work effective and helps to quickly find existing content and last but not least makes data backup easy. Teamwork is also great because of the object-oriented workflow. It is great that Paul Trotter is back! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The handling of tables is tricky and could be smoother. And: too many mouse clicks are needed. We would appreciate a better keyboard using. What we sometimes miss is the possibility to check out projects and edit them offline and check them in again. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Author gives me great help in managing and speeding up the management of translations of my documents. In a few steps I have the complete documents ready to send. I found the advice that i read in the author community that I read often very useful. I would like to have a lighter author manual for entry level users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I noticed some difficulties especially at the beginning. I would like some features to be added to get better and easier layout. I hope that a new version with some new features will be released soon. The author-it manual is too big, sometimes I find it difficult to find the sections that can help me. Inserting images is a somewhat slow procedure and it is necessary to have another software to manage them. During the layout of my documents I sometimes have to change or move some parts of the documents to get a good final layout. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AIT allowed us to grow from 1 help system and 20 paper manuals to multiple help systems (in a variety of flavors) and well over 100 paper manuals. Single-sourcing, reuse, variants, and release states allow us to work smarter, not harder, as we keep up with release updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AIT has a steep learning curve. As I've trained others on using it, I realize that much of my ability to navigate it, migrate our former Robohelp content, and get templates and such working smoothly is because of my background in computer science. Intuitively understanding copies versus instances of objects, templates, versioning, and object-oriented concepts was critical in setting things up in an effective way. I would love for AIT to provide more training and more help providing and/or setting up templates initially.

I would also love for AIT to better support single-sourcing. I'd love for it to automatically flag duplicate content and offer to merge it. I would love the ability to merge identical topics or graphics. Xtend does the exact opposite--it encourages more duplication, not less. I want the inverse of Xtend--"Hey, you're typing a definition of this field that's exactly the same as this other field. Would you like to make this an embedded topic and use it both places?" YES! This increases the ability to maintain documentation effectively, keeps our database smaller, makes our publish time smaller, and makes the output files smaller. Wins all around.

I would also love for Honeycomb to be embedded/enabled at no extra cost. This ties in to the single-sourcing. Our company will not pay for such a price hike, but man, could we use it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to write and re-use topics. Possibilities to maintain user rights. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not possible to use effectively in multilingual company. We don't get benefits of re-using topics between different branch offices because we have multiple source languages. System doesn't recognize for example Chinese as same language if it has been translated from different source languages (translation paths).

There are at least 4 different platforms (files, localize, ...) in the one program. And those are not made with the same logic.

ProCSS publishing was excepted to solve many publishing problems but it is quite complex to configure and some functions are impossible to implement. Proper manual for ProCSS commands is missing.

There is no user right limits in Files. That is a massive risk to loose everything.

There seems to be mystic publishing problems that AIT support doesn't admit.

Document sharing is missing from cloud version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.