Microsoft asks for suggestions wrt. more collaborative document authoring capabilities in Word

Spotted on the Microsoft Office Word Team's Blog:

"I'm curious what everyone would like to see enhanced in Word in terms of collaborative document authoring. Francis suggests the ability to "…break down (and recombine/build back up) our documents simply and reliably into (from) chunks/blocks/sections/subdocuments that individual authors could work on…" I'd love to hear more details and what others think.

What type of collaborative authoring are you involved in today? What are the pain points? How would you like to see Word address them? How wouldn't you like to see Word address them?"

You can make your suggestions at http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2008/03/06/comment-on-collaborative-authoring.aspx

AuthorIT Version 5

At last week's Online Help Conference Europe 2007, AuthorIT's Austrian distributors demonstrated AuthorIT version 5 and AuthorIT Xtend. These were officially released this week.

Verison 5 has a new UI (similar to the latest versions of Word and Outlook) and additional capabilities for controlling the published outputs.

They also demonstrated Xtend, which suggests reusable content while you type. If someone has already created the content you're writing about, then it will flag this up. It's a useful feature if you have a team of authors contributing content, a big library of content, or translated topic that you want to reuse. It's not cheap, however.

Author-it are running a series of free 2 hour Webinars on version 5 and Xtend:

Wednesday 3rd October
Thursday 11th October
Monday 8th October
Monday 22nd October
Tuesday 2nd October
Thursday 11th October

AuthorIT Live!

Ray Duncan from AuthorIT was in town this week, and I had an excellent chat with him yesterday afternoon. It was a great opportunity to throw out some suggestions for their product, and to get an update on what's due out in the near future.

AuthorIT Live!, which is due out very soon, sounds really exciting. It should offer a great environment for collaborative authoring - a flexible environment for professional technical authors and a controlled environment for engineers; access to the system wherever there's a PC with broadband access; plus all the other existing AuthorIT capabilities.