Let's say that you're part of a team of technical writers and your company is growing slowly but steadily. You're facing the inevitable crisis as your homegrown approach to documentation reaches its breaking point. What do you do? Or, let's say that you're that one lone, superhuman technical writer looking for a way to handle all the disparate documentation that you produce. What do you do? Last of all, maybe you're part of a large team of technical writers (don't laugh -- they have been spotted in the wild) that recognizes the need to manage content but wants to avoid the bank-breaking prices of large-scale solutions. What do you do? Aside from undergoing various manifestations of panic, the first thing you do is determine if you need to change your toolset. If accounting lets you consider that option, then the follow-up question is simply this: which tool is best suited to your needs?

In order to answer that question, you'll need to find good, solid reviews of the tool. That's when you discover yet another oddity of the technical writing world -- reviews of tech writing tools are strangely rare. When searching for advice on them several times during my career, I've discovered that the most informative tidbits lurk in forums, user groups, and in the minds of users and survivors of said tools. In other words, it's slim pickings. Those orts dwindle to nearly nothing when discussing content managment systems, such as AuthorIT. Let's start from the beginning, then. If you're in one of the situations above, would AuthorIT be right for you?

First of all, what is AuthorIT (AIT)? It is an XML-based content-management system, or CMS. A CMS stores your content in a database and provides a user-friendly way to access that data. Sounds generic, right? The beauty of a CMS lies in the fact that it provides a central location for your information and allows you to manage it as you see fit. You can locate individual pieces of documents simply, reuse snippets of data across many documents, and perform actions upon many documents at once, such as baselining, or metadata tagging (for instance: "all documents created by Ken are 'Widget X' project files"). Often, a CMS will allow you to single-source documents, which is to say, create them once and then deliver them in several different formats. Word, XML, PDF, and HTML are among the more popular formats.

AuthorIT is one of a few mature XML CMS products available, and it's aimed specifically at technical writers. While this won't be an exhaustive (or exhausting) review, I will address many of the issues you'll run across in day-to-day use. It's a review comprised from many months of tool use instead of the usual "new out of the box" review. Now, for AIT's strengths and weaknesses.

Appearance

AuthorIT offers a familiar interface much like Microsoft Word (the toolbar) and the Windows Explorer (the layout). You can create a toolbar for your specific styles and turn off the main toolbar, but the interface customization ends there. The icons themselves are servicable, but not eye-catching. The fonts are generally large enough. The overall look and feel is that of the Windows 95 era, which simply feels dated and unexciting. Appearance isn't everything, but using a tool is like painting your car -- you're going to see it every day, so you'd better be able to live with what you see.

Appearance is a weakness.

Usability

The aging interface approach also shows through in overall usability. You are virtually required to keep many separate windows open in order to accomplish your work. Can you drag a selection of objects to a closed book? No. You must open the book for editing, and then drag the items into the open book. Alone, this is not a big deal -- however, it is not the only such instance.

Drag-and-drop selections suffer from an infrequent, but annoying tendency to of lose their places. You'll double-click an object, blink, and notice it has moved several places up or down. When you drag an object, any intervening windows pop to the front, and any hierarchial lists inside re-arrange themselves before you release the mouse. As a result, data fidgets and you must be very accurate with your dragging.

With all that said, AIT is a GUI tool. No command lines requiring intricate keystrokes lie in wait. No templates with exposed XML prompt you to fill them out. AIT provides a familiar word-processing authoring environment. In the XML CMS world, that's still a rarity and makes it using the tool much easier than other such tools.

Usability is a neutral: weaknesses are balanced by strengths.

Functionality

AIT can output in the usual formats: PDF, HTML, Word, XML, XHTML, and in addition, CHM, HLP, and DITA. It's flexible in this aspect, and you can tweak the templates provided for most formats. The X/HTML template can be edited from within the tool itself, as can the Word template (each of these are subsumed in an AIT style). I've personally found the export to XML useful. However, watch out for the limitations. The styles do not allow much Javascript editing inside the tool. A problem for most? Surely not. But for the few that do need that functionality, it's like hitting a tire spike at 45 mph. You cannot output to PDF without installing Acrobat -- AIT could have used Ghostscript, the open-source postscript to PDF converter, but didn't. Even with Acrobat installed, no bookmarks display in the PDF. The XML output is almost flawless (it even includes a schema). However, it is generated in UTF-16 encoding, whereas Windows defaults to UTF-8.

Reuse is an area where AuthorIT shines. You can reuse objects throughout any given library, to any degree. Objects which contain many other objects, or which contain a smaller number of complex objects (such as tables) cause AIT to rapidly consume memory, though. Be kind to your machine and stock it full of memory.

Many writers can use AIT simultaneously without a hitch. It locks an object at whatever level it's edited. For example, if you are editing a document, only it is locked for your use. If you edit a book, then the book object, but not its contents (usually documents), is reserved for your use.

Overall, AIT gets the job done with few problems. The limitations are rare and most writers will not chance across them.

Functionality is a strength.

Scalability / Reliability

Outside of reuse feasting on memory, AIT scales well. It can handle small amounts of data as well as reams of data. There's no practical limit to the size of an individual library, and multiple libraries are handled with aplomb. You'll want to back up your libraries just as a matter of precaution, but I have not seen any data loss that wasn't due to pilot error. Keep in mind that if the connection to your database times out, AIT will not be able to save any changes after that point and will usually crash. It's not an AIT-generated problem per se, as any time-out or database disconnect generally causes clients to react unexpectedly. The solution? Save your files and exit AIT at the end of the day. Don't leave it running during long stretches of server inactivity or during server backups.

Scalability and reliability are strengths.

Backup / Version Control

AIT provides three manual ways to back up your data. You can export the entire library; you can backup its SQL databases manually; you can even create copies of the libraries through Windows itself. If you want to keep an old version of data, you must copy the library, rename the old one, and begin work in the new one. This shows the limits of backing up and version control in AIT. Version control, except as mentioned previously, simply does not exist. This may comes as a shock to those of you accustomed to Clearcase, Visual Source Safe, or other such environments. Granted that version control is not incremental except in pure text documentation environments (text, HTML, XML, etc), but with AIT, you would have to version the whole library at once. The granularity is sorely lacking.

Backup and version control are weaknesses.

Extensibility / Transparency

Unfortunately, AIT cannot be customized with third-party plugins, unlike Framemaker + XML. Its many output formats compensate for this, but not entirely. Transparency demonstrates a similar rigidity. No APIs are provided and neither is the SQL database structure. This will be of concern -- at least initially -- to only a few, but it may become more important the longer you use the tool. I've wanted to extract data directly from AIT databases several times, to avoid processing the XML.

Extensibility and transparency are weaknesses.

Support

Support is honestly a mixed bag. AIT is based in New Zealand, and for those on the opposite side of the world, support can be slow in coming. The individual testers have proven responsive and congenial, although their test lab may not be robust enough to reproduce your particular problem. Getting support from a local VAR is recommended by the company itself. Your mileage will vary. In general, your VAR is best for quick responses to easy-to-medium-level questions.

The documentation provided, both in the product itself, and on the company's website, is stellar. You'll find an extremely-detailed knowledge base and a well-informed Yahoo user's group. I highly recommend both of these for your odd or intricate problems. For the truly brain-melting, though, you'll have to contact AIT directly.

Support is a neutral: weaknesses are balanced by strengths.

Conclusion

With weaknesses in three categories and strengths in two, AIT comes out slightly behind overall. However, it depends on how important each area is to you and your team. I freely admit a penchant for lovable design and as a result, merely functional GUI designs chafe me; you may not be so annoyed by interfaces. I think of AIT as a workhorse. It may not be the most attractive or straightforward tool, but it can do what you ask and it rarely lets you down.

With all this said, a new version of the tool is rumored soon. The bottom line? Evaluate the new version of Author IT when it ships, and test it on a copy of your real data. Keep an eye out for the gotchas mentioned above and delight in its strengths. Whether you journey into this new world is up to you, but it helps to have another map in addition to the one that the vendor provided.

Mike is a technical writer based in Jacksonville, Florida. In his spare time, he maintains several sites, creates music, and builds interactive fiction games.