Dec 13 - 2006 -- SoftCare GmbH, a leading developer of workflow solutions for the publishing industry, today announced that Transcontinental Media, the largest consumer magazine publisher in Canada, has installed SoftCare K4 at its sites in Montreal and Toronto. The installation, the first sale of a K4 system to a Canadian publisher, solidifies the software’s reputation as a leading publishing solution, now throughout all of North America.
Transcontinental Inc. is also Canada’s second-largest community newspaper publisher and the seventh-largest printer in North America. The company’s Media sector, which publishes magazines and newspapers in English and French, has a distribution of more than 200 million copies annually, reaching more than 11 million readers per month. Among its 43 titles in consumer, business, trade and specialty categories are such well-known periodicals as “ELLE Canada”, “Canadian Living”, “The Hockey News” and “Style at Home”. Transcontinental’s newspaper portfolio includes 12 dailies and more than 125 weekly, bi-weekly and monthly newspapers.
SoftCare K4 replaces a Quark Publishing System that the company used for several years. The smooth transition offered by K4 played a large role in Transcontinental’s decision to switch to an entirely new Adobe-based system rather than upgrade their QPS installation, according to the company’s Information Technology team.
Transcontinental’s K4 purchase includes 48 French-language seats in Montreal to produce the business newspaper “Les Affaires”. The remaining 112 English-language seats, for a total of 160 concurrent user licenses, are being installed in Toronto. Four titles have already gone live with SoftCare K4, and Transcontinental expects to be producing 10 publications with K4 by 2007, when the rollout is complete.
“This sale is important because it illustrates K4’s power in a variety of situations,” said Dennis McGuire, President and CEO of MEI, the exclusive distributor of K4 in the Americas. “Transcontinental’s setup takes advantage of the software’s ability to handle multiple titles, multiple types of media, and even multiple languages.”