New Software Enables the Next Generation of Automated Publishing

Familiar User Interface Helps Subject Matter Experts Adopt Modern Content Creation Practices

DENVER, CO – Quark Software Inc. announced today the availability of Quark Author^TM, new Web-based software that allows business users and subject matter experts to create structured content within a word processor-like environment that keeps XML behind the scenes.

With Quark Author writers can create and organize content in components using standard content types such as sections, paragraphs, lists, tables, charts and figures. When created as structured components – or Smart Content – content can be dynamically assembled for output across mobile, digital and print channels. With Smart Content organizations are better equipped to engage customers at any point along the buying journey.

Find out more about Quark Author: http://www.quark.com/quarkauthor

Download the free eBook “The Beginner’s Guide to Smart Content”: http://www.quark.com/smartcontentebook

Shifting to Modern Content Creation
Traditional ways of creating content – almost always with a word processing application – trap valuable content into static, formatted documents that serve a single purpose. It is difficult and expensive to find, track and update this type of content in any meaningful way. Creators of high-value communication struggle to develop engaging, multichannel content without increasing teams and budgets.

A modern approach to content creation is to break content into components that can be managed, discovered and reused across channels. This is done by creating Smart Content, which is Quark’s name for the next generation of automated, XML-driven publishing. Examples of content that lends itself to a Smart Content approach include product marketing, financial research, policies and procedures and other documents that share one or more of these characteristics:

• High volume of similar documents
• High volume of revisions
• Frequently repeated creation processes
• Government or corporate regulated documents
• High possibility to reuse content across multiple documents
• Integration of data into the content
• Translated to multiple languages
• Delivered in multiple formats
• Delivered with multiple different presentation styles

“The benefits of XML as a content format have been proven by technical writers for years but, due to its inherent complexity, XML has been widely rejected by non-technical writers. We created Quark Author as an intuitive tool for business users to rapidly create, reuse and publish content across multiple channels through a familiar word-processing environment,” said Dave White, Chief Technology Officer for Quark Software Inc. “Quark Author is a Web-based authoring tool that offers distinct benefits to organizations, such as the ease at which IT teams can deploy the solution across the enterprise.”

Quark Author
Quark Author enables subject matter experts to rapidly create, preview and publish Smart Content while enabling publishing and content teams to:

• Keep track of where content components (text, images, charts, data) have been used for efficient content reuse
• Easily update a single source of content and manage dynamic content updates across multiple documents
• See previews of how content will look directly within Quark Author through tight integration with Quark Publishing Platform
• Utilize Web-based review and approval including commenting and track changes
• Automate multichannel publishing, increasing efficiency by up to 85% compared with traditional approaches
• Train fulltime and occasional authors quickly due to the extremely intuitive user interface and workflow
• Streamline compliance through comprehensive content tracking, versioning, workflow and permissions to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements
• Deploy easily across the enterprise with a native HTML5 application that works on any modern desktop Web browser without plugins
• Easily integrate with current business systems using familiar Web technologies

Quark Author utilizes the Smart Content Schema developed by Quark in partnership with its customers. The schema draws on decades of XML authoring and publishing experience, is heavily informed by DITA and other XML schema, and strikes a new balance between ease of use for authors and the robustness of XML semantics for rich multichannel publishing.