Recommendations to others considering Author-It:
The great thing about Author-it is that because it's a database, it enforces consistency and enables reuse of content.
Author-it gives you many options for reusing content: embedded text, variables, and variants, as well as the basic technique of using the same topic in multiple "books."
It can publish to Word, which makes it a good tool to have if you are working with reviewers outside the Docs team, since most of them will want to work in Word. It supports many other outputs, including TouchHelp.
I think it helps to have a fascination with the more technical side of Help authoring when you use Author-it. I like being able to make it do different things by incorporating Java scripts and .bat files. I have been using it long enough that I know how to interpret most error messages, but when I was first learning the product I would sometimes get errors when I tried to generate output that ended up meaning something simple, but were worded cryptically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?
We produce Tech Manuals and Install Guides that share a significant amount of content but differ slightly across products. The products are often released together as a suite, so we are often generating multiple Tech Manuals and Install Guides within the space of a few weeks. Before we got Author-it we maintained the Install Guides in Word and the manuals in FrameMaker, and did a lot of copying and pasting, with multiple writers performing the same edit in multiple documents. It took a lot of planning, but I was able to break down the Install Guide and Tech Manual for each product into basic topics, using Author-it's embedded text, variable, and variant features to customize the topics for different products. Now, if we get a tech doc update that affects multiple products, we often only need to edit one topic. It takes a lot less time than before to apply feedback and re-generate these documents during a review cycle.
We do a similar thing with Help and User Manuals. That was less complex to implement because there we did not have the problem of topics varying slightly across a number of products. Since our User Manuals duplicate content from the Help, once the Help content has been updated, a User Manual can be generated in a few minutes. Much better than copying and pasting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
