Remote work has been standard for some, an option for others, and rare for many. Now, a lot of us have been tossed in the work-from-home deep end together. Whether we sink or swim depends largely on frictionless collaboration.
Welcome to your office, 20ish steps away. This might be familiar turf to some of us -- Basecamp literally wrote the book on it -- but, to others, working from home is a whole new world, and new terrain requires new tools to help navigate it.
There’s enough new and developing technology out there to have you tool shopping into next year, coming out overwhelmed, and still being tool-less. We don’t want that, so we’ll focus on what we know best: content. Heretto’s collaborative editor gives distributed teams real-time editorial and organizational control over their content development, so work can be done, edited, reviewed, and deployed faster.
Working with teams may pose difficult communication issues even under the best circumstances, so when we need to #stayhome and continue being productive, effective distributed collaboration is crucial to your organization’s success. We might be cooped up in apartments or spare bedrooms, but content still has to move through development without a hitch.
Content Dev: How You Think It's Done & How It's Actually Done
We know that the content development process looks different per organization. However, there are similarities that make content development -- at its very best -- look something like this:
- A document is written
- The document is sent to the reviewer(s)
- The document is reviewed
- The document is sent back to the author(s), with comments
- The document is edited accordingly, then sent for final review
- The document passes (or doesn’t, then goes back to step 4) the final review
- The document is published
- Repeat
In the real world, content development rarely happens this way.
Documents are flying around to different parties, emails are lost, Slack threads meander unproductively, follow-ups are required (often several times), editorial reviews and comments are hot-potato passed back and forth, until, finally, the document is finished and ready to be published.
That’s on the best of days, too, when the whole company is working business-as-usual. Now, when businesses are running anything but as-usual, the stakes are even higher for effective communication in content development.
Everything You Need, All In One Place
Heretto’s crown-jewel capability is its collaborative editor. In fact, it’s the only DITA XML editor and Component Content Management System (CCMS) on the planet that allows synchronous, real-time collaboration. Let’s peek at what that looks like.
All Together Now
Multiple editors can be in a document at the same time. A document isn’t locked when one author is inside it making changes. With multiple authors able to produce a piece of content simultaneously, you greatly decrease the time it usually takes to build content.
Write Fast, Review Fast
You can say goodbye to sluggish back-and-forth interaction between content producers. With Heretto’s rapid review process, you can assign parts of content to reviewers who can keep track of their progress on the go, right in the document. Like the colorful icons in Google Docs, authors and reviewers, if they wanted, could be right next to each other in the document, writing and reviewing sentence by sentence together in real-time. Just ask F5 , whose team has been able to accelerate their review process by switching to Heretto's collaborative authoring feature.
Track Everything, Lose Nothing
Nothing is left uncertain. Every change made to the document is tracked and associated with the person who made it. That means that changes made by reviewers are added as suggestions that can be accepted or rejected comments load to the exact point they’re referencing in the document, and constant autosave offers peace of mind for your content team in the case of an errant network or system crash.
Full Organizational Control
Collaboration is wonderful, but tasks need to keep moving forward. That’s why Heretto’s assignment control tracks who is assigned what, what part of the content process they’re in, and what is left to be done for a document to be completed.
What Learning Curve?
You won’t need weeks of training to get the ball rolling in our collaborative editor. The interface looks and feels like ones you’re already familiar with. Get in the document, comment, edit, assign, and create, and let Heretto do the heavy lifting faster than you can say PDF.
With everything you need to write, review, collaborate, and publish, all in one place, developing content just got a whole lot easier. Assignments, workflows, and progress are tracked in one place, too, so there aren’t any missed messages or emails buried in inboxes to plague productivity.
With everything in its place, our DITA CCMS is a powerful tool that can help you turn minutes into milliseconds by allowing seamless, synchronous editorial power over your content from planning to publishing.
Think it’s too good to be true? Request a consultation and speak with our dedicated team of experts to see true, real-time collaborative authoring live.
