At the recent Air Force Technology in Training and Education (TITE) Conference in March, a call was made for a universal authoring system. This call was based on the recent proliferation in hardware and applications software technologies during major acquisitions for training by all of the military services. The TITE presentation by Linda Jensen, identified the inconsistencies between various hardware components, applications software packages, and actual training applications as a major drawback to effective and efficient, government, training programs. Part of the problem has been the cornucopia of "authoring systems" that have been created, marketed, and sold. These authoring systems have had three major drawbacks: they are usually incompatible with other authoring systems, they usually have limited applicability, working only with certain specific hardware and software systems, and, more importantly, they are not truly authoring systems. They are programming systems that assume the materials have already been authored and created. The paper presented at TITE addressed the need for an authoring system that works at all stages of a project, identified the general characteristics required of such an authoring package, and specified the capabilities and mechanisms that must be included. Further, it called for a standard that allows compatibility from one delivery system to another, regardless of hardware and applications software. The U.S. Army has identified a standard that approaches this ideal authoring system, the Production Management System (PMS). This paper compares PMS to the ideal authoring system described in the TITE paper and presentation. All of the requisite characteristics comprising a complete instructional system development tool are summarized, including electronic storyboarding, data management, media production, and lesson programming. The paper then looks at each of the characteristics and identifies the ability of PMS to meet the need. It also identifies any PMS capabilities not addressed in the characteristics of the universal authoring system, and evaluates those characteristics for inclusion in the proposed standard. The paper concludes with an analysis of the overall capability of PMS to serve as a universal authoring system, and specifies what capabilities need to be added to make it fully functional.