What are the benefits of a cloud authoring platform?

I was speaking of the pain of tracking multiple versions of documentation I spoke with a Documentation Manager last year and he was maintaining a spreadsheet tracking who was the author of which version of which document. There were 3 versions and no one was sure which was current.

That image has stuck with me for a lot. The scenario described in that image is not an edge case for documentation teams. It’s Tuesday for many of them.

No, cloud authoring platforms were not developed to solve some technical problem. They were developed because authoring, reviewing, and publishing of technical documentation had become a real pain for companies. In particular, the typical problems of versioning, geography-based processes, and the inevitable publishing bottleneck where one person holds the switch and is always on vacation when needed to publish, have all been eased by cloud authoring platforms.

Real-time collaboration without the file chaos

Most authoring tools were designed for a single writer in an office somewhere. They work fine when your team is in one location, but as you spread geographically (e.g., remote workers) or bring in Subject Matter Experts from all over the company (e.g., engineering teams), things quickly go south. Why would an engineer install a new authoring tool (say Flash) just to review 2 paragraphs of documentation written by someone else? Why would anyone! And yet, that is exactly what you are asking. Instead, open up a web browser on their computer say Flare Online cloud authoring platform.

By using a cloud authoring platform, all content authored within a project are authored by contributors within the same project in real time. Multiple Subject Matter Experts within a department or even multiple departments can author and review content within a browser in a matter of minutes by contributors who are scattered across the globe without having to install any desktop authoring software and without having to set up any environments and without having to negotiate with IT to get a license to install desktop authoring software.

Additionally, the negative impact that such additional efforts have on subject matter experts to install a new piece of authoring software in order to review 2-3 paragraphs of documentation is not to be underestimated. Many review cycles fail to complete because of the aforementioned friction.

Version control that actually works in practice

Version control for online authoring projects tracks every change that every writer makes to every document, with every change stored as part of a continuously growing history of every edit ever made to a document, by every writer who worked on a document, with every change annotated with a description of the edit and with optional notes about why the change was made. This allows the terrible change to be ‘rolled back’ to the prior, better version of a document in the worst case scenario. Online authoring systems with version control functionality avoid the typical publishing pitfalls by storing every version of every document online and allowing the online authoring function to be used by teams of writers to cooperatively author and review documents online, thereby avoiding the classic pitfalls of traditional, distributed publishing methods.

Version control in cloud-based authoring platforms is more than just a feature to check off on a list. It is the difference between being able to publish an update with confidence and hope that you did not overwrite something important in the process.

All of this can be critical for certain industries such as medical devices, software, aerospace and defense. The ability to have a clean and trackable change history is not only beneficial, but can also be required by law or regulation. For the author of this blog post, he was able to watch a team of people frantically try to put back together a change history that had been lost. Changes that had been made to documentation had been saved and distributed via email, spreadsheets and even altered file names and directories. It was a sad sight, and one that the author still recalls today. It would have been a simple matter to publish via a documentation tool that tracked all changes made to content and published the updated version to the web, or via print.

Scaling without the IT headache

One of the other real advantages that cloud authoring provides is the ability for teams to scale. Often with desktop-based authoring tools as a team or a project grows the environment around the authoring that the team uses quickly becomes a real mess to manage. However, with cloud-based authoring tools, all of the configuration information for the environment is also in the cloud. This means that adding a new author to a project is as simple as granting that author access to the project. It’s that straightforward. Your writers should be writing, not waiting.

Your writers should be writing. Not waiting.

• No per-machine installation or configuration
• Permissions managed centrally, adjusted quickly
• New team members can contribute same-day
• Platform updates roll out without any action required from users

Works from anywhere in the world for your workflow

A couple of years ago, many teams started working remotely. But what they realized is that accessible from anywhere was a benefit that was already there for a long time. When I worked on the MATLAB documentation team for example, we were spread across three locations (Singapore, London and Natick) and writers in Singapore wouldn’t be able to get hold of the latest build of a documentation project in the middle of the night to check something and make a change before the UK office opens in the morning. A contractor brought on board for 6 weeks to work on a 6 month long project wouldn’t be able to start writing the first month’s content because IT wouldn’t be able to provision a desktop license in time.

Your geographically distributed team works the same way as if everyone were in the same room.

There are a number of authoring tools that your writers, editors and reviewers can use online to author your documentation projects. Such as ANCHORLINK[Flare Online cloud authoring platform](https://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare-online/). All the environment setup and license management for such authoring tools are online and administered by one person for your team. There is no need for your writers to waste their time setting up local environments or figuring out why something works on their machines but not on others.

Publishing speed goes up, bottlenecks go down

A similar benefit can also extend to the publishing of the documentation. While traditional publishing of documentation would be confined to a single location (usually the location of the main author) and would rely on the person knowing how to publish the documentation (using FTP etc) as well as having access to the relevant deployment tools, publishing of documentation in the Cloud can be made available to others and can be configured to allow multiple outputs to be created and published by different individuals. Even better, the publishing of the documentation can be automated and can be scheduled to occur at predetermined times in the future. This can be especially powerful when combined with a CI/CD environment and content delivery network.

So while the ability to roll back is certainly an important history of change for cloud authoring platforms, it is by no means the only history of change. Indeed the bigger history of change is the history of change for the output of the authoring tool. As has already been stated all output is stored in the cloud for cloud authoring platforms, therefore all change to documents within such environments can be reversed. With all change to content stored in a single location in the cloud, and all collaborators working within the very same cloud environment, there is then no single person that can publish any change to a document. Because of this the process of publishing updates to content in such environments is significantly faster than for traditional documentation workflows. It is therefore not unusual to find that much of the publishing in cloud authoring environments is actually automated in some way. Change to be published automatically, on a schedule or as part of a greater build as part of integration with tools such as CI/CD and content delivery systems.

Here is a rough illustration that attempts to compare authoring workflows for desktop authoring tools versus cloud-based authoring platforms.

Closing Thoughts

I was hesitant to write the following but it is the other work, not just writing, that makes a person happy to go to work in the morning. And, as before, I have seen all the problems reappear when teams moved from desktop tooling to cloud-based systems. So, no, the tooling is not the whole answer.

When the tooling stops being a problem then the rest of your work becomes that much easier.

If your team is struggling with version control and workflow problems due to the team being geographically dispersed then it is worth asking if the problem lies with your documentation platform.