---
title: "Collaborative Authoring Trends and Costs"
date: 2009-12-11
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# Collaborative Authoring Trends and Costs

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](http://justwriteclick.com/2009/11/30/collaborative-authoring/). 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.