vjoon is set to unveil its Unified Publishing Process (UPP) at the IFRA Expo. Inspired by the supply chain management solutions used in other industries, UPP is tailored for publishing. vjoon, the developer of the K4 Cross-Media Publishing Platform, will also present a professional publishing solution for the iPad featuring K4 and Adobe's new Digital Magazine Solution. Additionally, vjoon will feature the K4 Distributed Enterprise System, which enables staff at remote production sites to quickly access data.

vjoon Unified Publishing Process - supply chain management for the publishing industry
Coordinating publishing workflows across diverse media poses a challenge for media companies, corporate pub­lishers and marketing organizations. Many legacy systems in place today are simply not up to the task, and the advent of digital magazines for the iPad has not made it any easier. The situation is much like it was years ago when online publishing first took off: Companies frequently see the publication of tablet editions as a separate and often insular task rather than part of a greater whole. What's more, conventional and corporate publishers have to cope with several different platforms (iOS, Android, etc.). This drives the cost of making high-quality apps and creates demand for uniform, process-driven and highly automated means of production. With its Unified Publishing Process, vjoon has taken a holistic approach to creating, managing and rendering contents for print, tablet, Web, mobile applications and whatever other platforms the future may bring. The company developed UPP with the benefits of supply chain management in mind and focused on enabling start-to-finish process control and creating highly automated workflows throughout the production process. As a result, UPP serves to control not only native processes, but also external workflows and outside systems.

"The Unified Publishing Process offers decisive benefits for publishing houses and corporate publishers. It streamlines the entire production process and simplifies the workflow by automating complex and recurring tasks, which saves time and money, affords greater creative leeway, and boosts productivity," says Andreas Schrader, CEO of vjoon GmbH. "This culminates in higher-quality content, tailored to suit the respective output channel. That means greater reader satisfaction and, consequently, higher advertising and sales revenue." The company integrates UPP on the basis of K4 Version 6.

Process-driven and automated iPad publishing with K4 – at no extra charge
Companies seeking to offer content for the iPad can achieve professional results under real-world publishing conditions now that vjoon K4 and the Adobe Digital Magazine Solution have been integrated. This powerful extension is already part of the K4 package: Version 6.3, as presented at the IFRA Expo, contains all the K4 functions necessary for iPad publishing. "We're concentrating on optimizing K4's iPad capabilities for everyday publishing, which is why we're looking at it from the holistic perspective of UPP," says Schrader. "That is, we're taking the conventional and corporate publisher's entire production chain into account. The workflow is also process-driven and highly automated from start to finish, eliminating many labor-intensive routine chores."

For example, vjoon K4 automatically reformats pages (for instance, by transforming print formats into portrait and landscape formats suitable for the iPad); adapts styles, units of measure (from millimeters to pixels) and the number of columns; and embeds multimedia and interactive content in InDesign. It can even repurpose text and pictures by embedding them repeatedly. K4 also automates other tasks: Its process-driven routines automatically generate files for mini issues (single articles or advertising) and also generate the entire magazine or annual report from individual files. This makes it very easy for editors to optimize or replace specific picture galleries, layouts and ads. Staff can also supervise production from start to finish conveniently and easily, thanks to the K4 Overview, which shows portrait and landscape formats for review in the same stack-type view as the iPad. They can post comments and revisions for authors, layout people and other editors using digital sticky notes. Much like a chat system, these notes facilitate communication and corrections in real time. Editors can easily compare the results to the print edition whenever they wish. Please find more information at www.vjoon.com/ipad

Great distances - local access speed: The K4 Distributed Enterprise System
"Companies that operate remote production sites achieve tremendous time savings when they use the K4 Distribu ted Enterprise System (K4 DES)," says Christian H. Hollstein, product manager at vjoon. If a user at a location far from headquarters wants to work on a layout, the Adobe InDesign document is provided by the on-site K4 Local Data Storage (K4 LDS) rather than the remote K4 Server at the company's headquarters. Layout files including all placed objects (for example, pictures, videos, etc.) open as quickly as the local network can deliver them, which is far faster than retrieving a file from the remote central server. This benefit works both ways: The edited InDesign file is first saved to the K4 LDS on site and then forwarded automatically to the central K4 server without consuming the local workplace computer's resources. The central K4 Server automatically updates and synchronizes all associated InDesign files so that users at locations everywhere always access the same data. This is another example of the Unified Publishing Process at work: Much like a supply chain management system that coordinates and synchronizes logistics, K4 DES delivers the right file to the right destination far faster. These advantages are beneficial not just for big media companies with distributed locations, but also for corporate publishers and smaller publishing houses.

vjoon at the IFRA Expo and the IFRA Expo Media Port
vjoon will present all the new features of the latest Version 6.3 of vjoon K4 at 1.530 (Hall A1). Visitors to the booth will also have the opportunity to meet the integration partners SNAP Innovation, mainblau, and Catena Company, as well as the development partners CoreMedia and DALIM SOFTWARE.