Collaborative Authoring Trends and Costs

December 11th, 2009 | Posted in Technical Writing, Web 2.0 2 Comments »

How do you go from 5 authors to 47, all collaborating on the same documentation? This is the issue Anne Gentle wrestles with in her post Collaborative Authoring — Tools and Costs. She explores everything from Author-it Live to Drupal, Mediawiki, Alfresco, and SharePoint, including cost breakdowns for each tool.

Anne also cites research from Forrester about the rising trend of collaborative authoring:

37% of organizations surveyed in Forrester’s Q4 2008 enterprise and SMB software survey consider implementing a collaboration strategy important in 2009

My Thoughts:

I think collaborative authoring will continue to grow in the future. Large, expensive solutions may give way to more popular, open-source options. As more groups adopt open-source solutions, the open-source solutions will become stronger. Any time you have thousands of developers and users behind a platform, they create a surge of extensions and themes, hacks and tutorials, enhancements and workarounds.

No single project team can compete with the collective contributions of thousands of developers on a global scale. And just maybe — here’s a thought — the best platforms for collaborative authoring are those platforms that are collaboratively constructed themselves.

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Tags: Anne Gentle, collaborative authoring

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Larry Kunz says:

December 11, 2009 at 12:49 pm

All of the trends are pointing this way. In fact, collaborative authoring is fast becoming the norm — if it isn’t the norm already.

I’m afraid we might be in for a few years of “wild, wild west” as the various formats and solutions vie for supremacy. Eventually we’ll reach consensus on a small set, driven (as you say) by open-source standards. DITA has emerged as a standard for topic creation and reuse; now we’re starting to see viable open-source content management systems. Maybe the next big thing will be aligning the various community-based authoring tools with these standards.

Trends in Technical Writing -- Responding to a Reader's Questions | I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson says:

January 8, 2010 at 1:30 am

[...] Collaborative Authoring Trends and Costs [...]

I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson