Hot Vendors in Content Authoring, 2013

Author: Jim Lundy                                                                  Date: April 28, 2013

Topic: Collaboration                                                   Research Note Number: 2013-11

Issue: Who are the collaboration providers and how will they evolve?

Summary: Content authoring and sharing continue to evolve. New tools are easier to use and offer more ways to create and share rich content. 


Once, paper documents ruled the office, but the new world of work is founded on rich digital multimedia content. This growing portfolio of rich content continues to be a challenge, but accessing and viewing it is rapidly becoming routine due to the growing abundance of storage and bandwidth. Today’s challenges are in the creation part of the content lifecycle, especially when non-specialist end users rather than media professionals create it. Content authoring skills no longer focus on documents, but on finding fast and easy ways to let non-specialists combine text, graphics, images, voice and video into a coherent and compelling story that can inspire, inform or entertain.

If we need any proof that tablets are here to stay, we have only to look at how much they help us create and share this content, and how easy they make it (see Note 1). The next generation of content authoring tools will be natively mobile and even easier to use. This research note introduces four of the hot vendors that are currently building these new tools (see Note 2).

What are the implications here for knowledge workers? Well for starters, it is still hard – very hard – to manage rich media on a Windows system. Yes, you can now get Movie Maker, but compared to Windows, Macs, iPads and Android tablets have more authoring apps for rich content and they capture, manage and deliver it far more easily and consistently.

Note: This is part of Aragon’s archived research. Please visit our Coverage Areas page to view our most recent content.

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