When organizations decide to use DITA for structuring, developing, managing, or publishing content, they usually already have content written in other formats and need to convert it to DITA. There are a variety of possibilities for a conversion to DITA, depending on the original format of the content.
Migration from other formats to DITA is rarely perfect and manual changes may need to be made to the converted content, but the methods described below should help you find the best approach for your particular case.
There are various possibilities for migrating content from Microsoft Office® (and other Office-type formats) to DITA. For details, see Migrating MS Office Documents to DITA.
In all cases, you may need to make some manual adjustments in the resulting documents for elements that couldn't be mapped.
There are several possibilities to convert HTML content to DITA:
There is a blog post that details various possibilities for converting Unstructured FrameMaker content to DITA: Migrating Unstructured FrameMaker to DITA.
This open-source project contains such a stylesheet that attempts to convert a Flare project to DITA XML along with instructions on how to use it. As an alternative, some recent MadCap versions seem to have facilities to export content directly to DITA.
You may find third-party applications (such as Pandoc) that can convert your content to HTML or to some kind of XML format like DocBook. Once you have HTML or DocBook content, you can convert them to DITA using one of the methods described above.
There are various possible methods available for converting DITA content to Confluence and other formats (such as Microsoft Word or HTML). For details and ideas for some of the possible methods, see the DITA to Confluence blog post.