Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution

On Thursday last week Quark held a short but very interesting product launch seminar to give a few important clients and press a glimpse of Quark’s Dynamic Publishing Solution. Mekon Creatives were also very privileged to be invited.

For those of us who have been involved with technical publications for several years, the concept of dynamic publishing is not new. Our parent company Mekon for one has developed dynamic publishing solutions for many years using SGML, XML, or a SQL database combined with tools such as E3, XyEnterprise XPP, Antenna House XSL Formatter and Quadralay Web Works to name but a few. Such solutions lend themselves very well to technical publication workflows, where content can be re-used for multiple products and document types, feeding through to several output or delivery formats.

In the past two years Mekon has carried out many Content Strategy Audits at high tech and manufacturing companies. In all these companies the results of the audit showed the potential for re-use in marketing publications, and it is already well understood that marketing departments need to produce many different output formats. This is where the problem starts. Marketing have different design driven challenges than technical communications and hence use products like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress to produce the ever changing marketing communications information. They are not about to swap these traditional design tools for content driven tools such as Adobe FrameMaker, JustSystems XMetaL or PTC Arbortext Editor.

So all this lead up is to prepare you for what we believe is a fantastic step forward for marketing departments and their need to integrate with the wider tech comms content-driven workflows. Simply put, what has been missing is an XML content interface to allow marketing department to continue using their favoured layout tools and reap the benefit of this current XML revolution.

Quark Dynamic Publishing solution has the potential to be this missing link.

Ray Schiavone, Quark CEO, delivered the brief which indicates the importance they place on this product. Interestingly the demonstration showed In.Vision Express Author producing valid XML content, managed in an open source CMS, automatically publishing the content through predefined QuarkXpress templates to produce PDF and HTML output. Their plan is to add other output types, in particular mobile devices. We also heard that they are working on DITA support which is clearly where the market is going these days

Watch this space