The latest Creative Suites from Adobe - Creative Suite 3 Design for graphic designers, CS3 Web for web developers, and CS3 Production for audio/video producers all provide a high level of tool integration.

Note that these comprehensive suites all include some tools that Adobe acquired with their Macromedia purchase, most importantly Flash, but also Dreamweaver, RoboHelp, the former RoboDemo (now Captivate), and Breeze (now Connect).

Integration means creating an asset in one tool then incorporating it in another by reference. When you edit the original material, it gets changed wherever it is included.

This is nowhere more important than in a new Adobe tool suite, to be released later this month and aimed at technical writers, at subject matter experts who want to try their hand at producing their own documentation, and at instructional designers hoping to produce their own course materials.

The new suite is called the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.
http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite/features/

It combines the just released FrameMaker 8, RoboHelp 7 (the second release of RoboHelp this year and proof of Adobe’s commitment to maintaining their user assistance tool as a market leader), Captivate 3 (also recently released and filling the eLearning hole left by Macromedia Authorware), and Acrobat 8 (with its extraordinary ability to integrate 3D files that can be viewed in interactive 3D in the latest Acrobat Readers).

The Technical Communication Suite is fully multilingual with Unicode support throughout. Not only are font menus showing options in the font itself, menus and other options display in their native languages.

You can include Help in FrameMaker projects, eLearning in RoboHelp and in Frame, 3D animations in Help and Frame and in PDF documents, RoboHelp screen captures from Frame, etc, etc. All the tools include direct access to aspects of the others from within the tool. You do not have to leave one tool to “Edit with…” another tool. And no longer are conversions needed to reuse assets.

If you reuse some Frame content in a RoboHelp project, and then update the Frame document, it automatically updates in your RoboHelp. This is meaningful single-sourcing without XML includes or DITA conrefs.

It's like one big toolset for technical communicators and for instructional designers.

Take a look and leave comments to tell me what you think.