In all organizations there are highly specialized tools used to produce and organize documents but integrating these with your content management platform can not only be difficult but, at times, even knowing where to start can be a great challenge. In an authoring environment integrating with these tools can make or break your CMS platform. Alfresco already includes many open source projects that help with integration; utilizing these, external tools can communicate both into and out of Alfresco to streamline authoring and publication of content. The talk will go over: Problems of authoring content outside of CMS; Highlighting common authoring tools and external systems; Demonstrating integrations to Microsoft Word, Adobe Drive, Adobe InDesign server, XML database (eXist/ MarkLogic); and Overview of integration methods with benefits and drawbacks. The talk will mainly be a presentation with some brief breakouts to run through pseudo code and show examples.