Publishing industry decision-makers met on Friday, November 29, at the annual international vjoon K4 User Conference in the port city of Hamburg. Are Your Processes Lean Enough? That was the theme for this year's gathering, which attracted more than 150 guests from around the world. Keynote speaker Andreas Bayer of Porsche Consulting touched on this issue theme in his opening speech when he discussed ways in which industrial manufacturing practices can be applied to publishing. A mainstay of vjoon K4 product strategies, the Unified Publishing Process (UPP) was also the focus topic of most of the other presentations, case studies and workshops. The event was brought to a close with guests winding down from a busy day, enjoying good food in the relaxed setting of Hagenbeck Zoo's Tropical Aquarium.

As the many examples of real-world best practices impressively demonstrated, highly automated workflows can help publishers and agencies put diverse publishing strategies into action and work far more efficiently. These applications also showed how deeply vjoon K4 can be integrated into the workflows of very different companies: The major multinational publisher Condé Nast International is unifying its global publishing IT with vjoon K4. The German news magazine FOCUS from Hubert Burda Media uses it to deliver a tablet edition just a few hours after the printed magazine's deadline. And agencies and smaller creative teams rely on this publishing software to produce premium quality corporate publications and develop special print and digital solutions. Other highlights included an exclusive demo of the latest version of vjoon K4, as well as a preview of the company's medium-to-long-term product strategy. In keeping with this strategy, the company built even more DAM capabilities into vjoon K4 and developed the technical capacity to rapidly implement larger modules that are already in the pipeline. Lectures explored the software's capabilities in great depth. They were followed by four hands-on workshops that expounded on the versatility and flexibility of vjoon K4 so that its extensive feature set was presented and discussed in the context of real-world applications.

Comments on vjoonity:
Malcolm Simms, CTO Condé Nast International: "It was great to share my experiences with the vjoon community. This conference highlighted the benefits of using vjoon K4 in a practical approach."

Meghan Milkowski, Vice President Prometheus Global Media: "I had a wonderful time in Hamburg and came 
away from the Conference with a lot of great ideas. I‘m looking forward to the next version of vjoon K4 to optimize our workflow."

Frank Schöne, Head of Publishing Platform, KircherBurkhardt: "I sought to learn more at the vjoonity about the upcoming software version of vjoon K4 and the next development steps. All my expectations have been fulfilled. I'm already looking forward to next year."

"Industry decision-makers appreciate this event, as the – yet again – high attendance numbers, many constructive discussions and positive feedback attest," says vjoon GmbH CEO Andreas Schrader. "Our customers value the practical nature of the featured topics and the unique opportunity to interact directly with vjoon, our partners and other industry players. The vjoonity is a key component of our customer-centric corporate culture, so we're pleased to announce that we will also put this successful concept into practice in North America starting in 2014."

Now that Hamburg has become the go-to location in Europe, the vjoonity is to plant a further footprint in America to address what has traditionally been one of the biggest markets for vjoon K4. The vjoonity Americas is slated to take place in New York in the summer of 2014, with the vjoonity Europe to follow in the fall of 2014 in Hamburg.

Go to www.vjoonity.com and www.vjoon.com to learn more about the vjoonity and get pictures. The photo gallery is already up; a short video clip of the event will be posted shortly. vjoon also provides more information via a Twitter feed that contains earlier posts with links to the event.