By Kelly Kordes Anton

The future of content-driven, media-independent publishing comes to life with new Quark® enterprise solutions founded on Quark technology, partnerships, and open standards.

QuarkXPress Server (formerly QuarkDDS) is a part of the Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution. In X-Ray Magazine v4n2 take a look at a case study provided by e-nvention, an authorized QuarkXPress Server XTensions developer.

Let's say you're anxiously awaiting the outcome of a nail-biter such as Super Bowl XLII — not to find out if you won the office pool — to drop in the right headline for your newspaper, update your web site, and send out an email blast instantly. Unlike the T-shirt vendors — who are ready with artwork for both teams, waiting to see whether to imprint the New York Giants or the New England Patriots — you don't have the luxury of pushing a button and printing to one media.

As the clock runs down, you're furiously typing in Microsoft® Word, coming up with a clever headline and inserting the final score. You finish seconds after the game ends, sending your story off on its circuitous route to print, web, email, news feeds and more. A quick pass by an editor and copyeditor, and next thing you know one copy has been passed to a designer to drop into a QuarkXPress® page, another copy is being tagged for the web, and another copy is prepped for an email blast. Like any writer, you go back and reread your golden submission, patting yourself on the back, admiring your words, until you spot a Freudian slip of "giant" proportions — you typed Peyton instead of Eli.

Now you really have to scramble, fixing the error, notifying the editors, tracking down all those copies and departments to get the change made before it goes out and humiliates you. While these graphic designers and programmers are busy manually manipulating your text to make it palatable to their particular media, you interrupt them to make this crucial change — and make the change correctly. You end up causing re-flow in the print document but catch the web programmer just in time. The email blast is already out in cyberspace, spreading the mistake far and wide. You just wish you could go back in time and fix the error before it got this far.

This is where Quark comes in

What's the problem with this system? Besides all those bodies and departments essentially disseminating the same news, this is not a content-driven system. There is no "master file;" there are copies of files in different departments with different formatting applied to each. Revisions, ever present in publishing, are cumbersome and time consuming. Now, imagine a solution —not a single product, but an integrated solution — that relies on a single source of information, formats it automatically for various devices, and distributes it.

Today, Quark is making it happen with core Quark technologies such as QuarkXPress and QuarkXPress Server along with open standards such as structured XML and technology partners such as Alfresco®. They're calling it Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution, a fully custom, automated, multi-channel publishing system backed by solid design.

This is not just a product, it's a solution," says Nick Howard, Quark's director of enterprise product management. "It weaves together multiple products into an enterprise-level system that gives you the design and dynamic publishing power you need. We're creating a configurable solution that can be customized differently for specific use cases and workflows."

While the company is teaming up with other strategic technology partners, the customer only has to deal with a single vendor with a proven track record in publishing technologies: Quark. "We're helping enterprise customers respond to changes in the world and in publishing," says Howard.

Completely Customizable Solutions

"In today's world, print isn't enough — people want an interactive experience," says Joshua Duhl, director of enterprise product marketing for Quark. "Consumers are saying 'give me the content that suits me.'" To that end, the new Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution is fully customized for each enterprise based on their content and customers. Regional system integrators for different vertical markets — such as financial services and retail — are lined up to help customers analyze their goals and needs then design and implement the ideal system.

Every system will look different says Duhl, but a typical configuration might look like this: "Content is created in Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress, converted to structured XML, managed by QPS, and output to print, web, and email." The customized nature of the solution makes it scalable to smaller environments. In addition, the ability to integrate it with Quark Publishing System® offers an easy upgrade path for current QPS customers.

According to Quark's CEO, Ray Schiavone, "Over the past year I have visited at length with key customers across Europe, North America, and Asia. These customers — some of the largest and most well-known publishers and creative groups in the world — confirmed that their publishing requirements are changing dramatically." Schiavone continued, "We are solving these challenges with Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution by helping our customers improve automation, create reusable content, and more efficiently publish to multiple channels. This is the basis of dynamic publishing, the next revolution in publishing."

Jim Haggarty, CIO at Quark, adds, "Quark DPS is a solution, and we have a number of functions within the solution. Customers want to know if QuarkXPress server is the publishing engine. The answer is that QuarkXPress Server is the foundation of the publishing engine, but an engine that has been expanded to be more robust, scalable, and fully integrate. Our solution also includes content-management."

Although the solutions are custom, they will generally follow the same four steps: create content, manage content, publish content, and finally deliver content. Read on for details on how Quark is making this happen (see chart).

Figure 1 With the Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution, there are four steps: Create, Manage, Publish, and Deliver.

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