In a 2007 EContent column, I compared MadCap Flare to Adobe RoboHelp and suggested they were moving toward XML and perhaps even DITA.

Now MadCap Software has announced a beta program and road map that will integrate DITA XML into several MadCap products, including Flare, Blaze, Analyzer, Lingo, X-Edit, and the forthcoming Team Server.. The suite of tools will allow creating, managing, translating, and publishing DITA content without third-party tools like the DITA Open Toolkit.

See MadCap's DITA page for more details.

Mike Hamilton, MadCap VP of Product Management, says the new tools will work alongside any DITA tools your organization already has in place. You can import existing DITA topics or whole projects. You can analyze the content, for example locating phrases that are similar but not identical. Making phrases truly identical will enhance reuse and lower translation costs in Lingo, their integration of DITA authoring with translation memory.

This is a major move for MadCap, who has joined the OASIS Technical Committee and will help in the development of the DITA standard. The MadCap DITA initiative has three phases:

In the first phase , MadCap Software will add DITA support to four products:

• MadCap Flare, the company’s flagship product for single-source, multi-channel publishing
• MadCap Blaze, their topic-based publishing application for long-print documents
• MadCap Analyzer for reporting, analyzing and proactively suggesting improvements to content
• MadCap Lingo, their integrated authoring and translation memory system

With MadCap Flare and Blaze, authors will be able to import DITA projects and topics as raw XML content, and using the XML editor, change the style sheets to get the desired look and structure.

Authors will then have the option to publish the output as DITA content; print formats, such as Microsoft Word, DOCX and XPS or Adobe FrameMaker, PDF and AIR; and a range of HTML and XHTML online formats. MadCap’s software handles the DITA transforms, so authors don’t have to. MadCap Analyzer will work directly with DITA topics and projects to allow authors to analyze and report on the content. Similarly, MadCap Lingo will import data directly from DITA topics and projects, so that it can be translated. The translated material can be published as DITA content or exported to a Flare or Blaze project.

In the second phase, MadCap will enable authors to natively create and edit DITA topics in Flare and Blaze, as well as MadCap X-Edit, MadCap’s software family for creating short documents, contributing content to other documents, and reviewing content. Like Flare and Blaze, X-Edit will also support the ability to import and publish DITA information.

In the third phase, MadCap will add DITA support to its forthcoming MadCap Team Server. This will make it possible to manage and share DITA content across teams and projects, as well as schedule DITA publishing.

Here is a diagram showing possible workflows: