Jenkintown, PA (February 19, 2002) -- Managing Editor Inc. (MEI), a software development and integration firm, announces the availability of version 4.2 of the K4 Publishing System. K4 is a cross-platform collaborative workflow system that integrates Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy with a powerful and open SQL database to provide workflow management to any kind of publisher. Version 4.2 offers support for InDesign 2.0.2 and InCopy 2.0.1 as well as new features and enhancements, including template management and job assignments for users and user groups. The new version allows article and layout templates to be stored and managed from within the database, so editors and designers can create new documents from specific pre-defined InCopy and InDesign templates directly from K4 without accessing external file servers. InCopy templates -- with full layout geometry, one or several text elements, and all style sheet information -- can be created easily from InDesign and made available to writers and editors in-house or in remote locations. The new version offers special privilege-based access for check-in, checkout and modification of templates, section-based organization of template files, and a facility to make templates available to system users. K4 version 4.2 also offers active workflow routing of articles and layouts, so that files can be assigned to a specific user or user group. User groups are fully customizable, and all K4 settings -- including user group configurations and routing assignment defaults per section and status -- may be modified in K4 at any time, even while the system is up and running. Users can search K4 to list articles and layouts that correspond to a pre-defined or temporary query, and maintain a filtered view of their own assignments. Also in version 4.2, dynamic queries can be based not only on the "current" issue, but also the "previous" and "next" issues of a publication, so that the queries needed most often can be saved once and reused regularly without user maintenance. Status colors can be selected to highlight files at specific workflow stages for easy identification.