First impressions of MadCap’s purchase of IXIASOFT

Mad­Cap Soft­ware’s pur­chase of IXIASOFT makes sense to me as it broad­ens Mad­Cap’s offerings.

I like Mad­Cap Flare and have rec­om­mend­ed it to a few clients over the years. While Flare already uses an XML-based archi­tec­ture, I have nev­er seen it used with Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA). By buy­ing Mon­tre­al-based IXIASOFT, Mad­Cap broad­ens its offerings—it now can sell a com­po­nent con­tent man­age­ment solu­tion that is based on the DITA standard.

It also shakes things up for Mad­Cap. I’ve heard from a few writ­ers and man­agers that Flare is start­ing to feel “dat­ed.” One client I worked with won­dered whether it should be offered as a soft­ware as a ser­vice (Saas). Even with reg­u­lar updates to the soft­ware, the first ver­sion of the soft­ware is more than 15 years old. One of Mad­Cap’s co-founders over­saw the devel­op­ment for Robo­Help, anoth­er help author­ing tool that start­ed in 1992. 

I would like to see a com­pa­ny like Mad­Cap fur­ther broad­en its soft­ware by offer­ing a superb wiki-based solu­tion that a team of writ­ers could use in an orga­ni­za­tion. Ide­al­ly, it would be a wiki devel­oped to han­dle com­plex tech­ni­cal documentation—with sup­port for con­di­tions, vari­ables, and snip­pets. In my opin­ion, it would stand out in the mar­ket­place. I recent­ly used Con­flu­ence again and was dis­ap­point­ed how lit­tle it seems to have evolved since I last used it years ago. 

In sum­ma­ry, I can see why Mad­Cap acquired IXIASOFT. Do you agree with my quick assess­ment? Are there oth­er author­ing tools you would like to see developed?