AMSTERDAM - May 10, 2005 - Quark Inc. announced today that VNU Business Media Europe, Europe’s largest IT publisher, has successfully implemented Quark Content Manager (QCM) for all of its UK magazine titles and is now rolling out the solution across all of its European publishing divisions. "Content is our most important asset, and with today’s changing publishing environment, managing, storing, reusing, and syndicating content efficiently is essential." said Ajit Patel, VNU’s chief technology officer. "We believe that Quark Content Manager is the best publishing-focused content management solution on the market today, and as such is enabling VNU to achieve its multi-channel vision and move ahead of our competitors." The UK division of VNU has been the company’s primary test site for QCM in Europe. VNU has been in live production with QCM in the UK for several months. Each magazine title now stores and manages all of its content within QCM, including QuarkXPress, image, text, and Word files. In fact, QCM can store just about any file type that the company chooses. QCM is also enabling the automated creation of high- and low-resolution PDFs for print and eBooks through the integration of Callas’ AutoPilot and OneVision’s Asura, as well as XML generation and automatic content feeds to PDAs and VNU’s Web sites and syndication partners. Syndication made easy One of the important functions that QCM performs for VNU is content syndication. VNU content is syndicated to more than 100 countries. QCM has a Web-based client to access all of the content stored and managed within QCM. Through user-controlled access rights, all of VNU’s syndication partners around the world can log on to the Web client and instantly access the syndicated content. VNU employees and freelance writers are also using the Web-based client to access and work on content remotely. "VNU is a visionary company that very early on recognized how important cross-media publishing and digital media would be to their future," said Matthew Wallis, Quark European VP of sales. "By implementing a cross-media publishing solution, VNU now has a business platform that brings it real business advantages in what is a fiercely competitive market." European-wide implementation VNU has now successfully implemented QCM across all of its UK titles with 50 concurrent users on the system. The rollout in the Netherlands is already well under way, and Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium will follow. Eventually more than 80 VNU publications across Europe will be using QCM, driving content to over 100 VNU Web sites. Quark Digital Integration Toolkit For cross-media publishing to work effectively, it is essential that content can be stored separately from the presentation of that content. The natural format for achieving this is XML. This capability is at the heart of QCM and VNU’s strategy. Along with QCM, VNU uses Quark Data Integration Toolkit, software that essentially takes an input content source, such as an SQL database or Excel spreadsheet, and transforms it into XML. Through an easy-to-use visual interface, content can be mapped to and transformed from the source content to a defined XML structure. This capability makes Quark Data Integration Toolkit the ideal tool for converting VNU’s print content into an XML format suitable for publishing to the company’s Web sites and e-mail messages, uploading to PDAs, or syndicating to other publishers and information providers. "We believe that Quark Data Integration Toolkit is Quark’s most exciting product. Its potential is enormous and that is saying something considering the breadth and depth of Quark’s current product range," said Patel. VNU representatives estimate that by using Quark Data Integration Toolkit to perform the data-conversion processes that many publishers outsource at £200-£300 per issue, they are saving an additional £20-30K a year on data conversion alone.