MADCAP SOFTWARE TO PROVIDE FIRST COMPLETE AUTHORING AND PUBLISHING SUITE OF TOOLS FOR DITA; NO EXTRA TOOLKITS OR DEVELOPER RESOURCES REQUIRED
MadCap Unveils DITA Product Roadmap at DocTrain East; Joins Oasis to Contribute to DITA Standard EvolutionBurlington, MA – October 29, 2008
— MadCap Software, the leader in multi-channel content authoring and a showcase company for Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft XPS, today unveiled its roadmap for supporting the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard. With MadCap, authors will have the first complete authoring and publishing suite of tools for creating, managing, translating and publishing DITA content—without the need for third-party toolkits or developer resources.MadCap also has become a sponsor member of OASIS, the not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. As a member of OASIS, MadCap has joined the DITA committee to contribute to the evolution and adoption of this standard XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical information.
Today’s announcements are being made in conjunction with the DocTrain East Conference, which runs October 29-November 1, 2008 at the Boston Marriott Burlington in Burlington, MA. MadCap is a platinum sponsor of the conference.
DITA Content Without XML Programming
MadCap Software will add DITA support to its family of native XML applications, which are designed to enable a complete content workflow. The products will use MadCap’s proven and popular XML editor, which provides an intuitive graphical user interface for creating richly featured documentation that hides the XML being generated below. This will enable authors—for the first time—to create and publish DITA content without writing a line of XML code or relying on third-party DITA transform toolkits.“DITA holds incredible promise for facilitating data consistency and reuse, but for many companies, it remains far too unwieldy to implement. Documentation professionals have had to become XML experts, obtain help from developers, or rely on third-party toolkits, which often cannot fully automate the required transforms,” said Mike Hamilton, MadCap vice president of product management, a member of the OASIS DITA committee, and a presenter at DocTrain East 2008. “We are here to change that with MadCap. Just as our state-of-the-art MadCap products provide authors all the content reuse and integration benefits of XHTML, so too will these benefits extend to authors using DITA. Soon documentation professionals will be able to deliver DITA content across multiple channels and languages—without the headaches of programming or integrating toolkits.”
In the first phase of its DITA initiative, MadCap Software will add DITA support to four products:
- MadCap Flare, the company’s flagship product for single-source, multi-channel publishing
- MadCap Blaze, the first topic-based publishing application for long-print documents
- MadCap Analyzer for reporting, analyzing and proactively suggesting improvements to content
- MadCap Lingo, the industry’s first integrated authoring and translation memory system
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.
Content Experts Praise MadCap Approach to DITA
“Configuring the DITA Open Toolkit to produce attractive output is a significant obstacle to DITA implementation,” said Sara O’Keefe, president of Scriptorium Publishing. “MadCap's plan for DITA support offers a potential alternative to the Open Toolkit. This should allow us to create cross-browser, cross-platform help from DITA content with a greatly reduced configuration effort.”“Based on the initial demonstrations of DITA support in the upcoming MadCap software, it is safe to say that the team continues to innovate and improve its offerings to be compatible with where the market is headed,” said Bernard Aschwanden, president of Publishing Smarter. “As the owner of a business that provides DITA-related consulting, conversion, and training services, we get requests for information about DITA daily. By adding DITA support, we see another example of MadCap's dedication to the field of technical communications and structured authoring.”