Hamburg - Quark announced today that Quark Publishing System can be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to offer the 100 million SharePoint users worldwide a single, affordable system for workflow, collaboration, and dynamic publishing that spans across all departments. By uniting SharePoint and Quark Publishing System, knowledge workers and creative departments can collaborate within one system to create, edit, revise, and publish brand-compliant, cross-media marketing communications. This enables organizations across industries to boost the return on their SharePoint investment by reducing the cost of publishing marketing material while reaching target audiences more frequently with accurate and timely information.

"By integrating Microsoft SharePoint and Quark Publishing System, Quark seeks to create greater value for our customers by enabling them to accelerate the content development and delivery lifecycle," said Jenni Flinders, Vice President of the U.S. Partner Business Development and Sales group at Microsoft. "Quark's investment is indicative of the rich innovation fostered in the Microsoft Partner ecosystem and its commitment to serving our customer community." 

Through the integration of Quark Publishing System – the engine that enables dynamic, collaborative publishing – with SharePoint – Microsoft's widely-used enterprise-class system for coordinating, communicating, and sharing information across an organization – users can reduce publishing costs, increase accuracy and timeliness, eliminate redundancy, and publish across print, Web, and digital media seamlessly. This integration builds on Quark's existing integration between Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress, which allows Word users to contribute and control content in QuarkXPress layouts.

Publish Directly From Word to Multiple Media: Print, Web, Digital
"In most organizations, knowledge workers and publishing teams waste valuable time and resources trying to collaborate using ineffective tools and processes. Critical activities such as project management, content creation, and publication review involve enormous manual effort and coordination. The pain is shared by all – these inefficiencies affect both knowledge workers and publishing teams," said PG Bartlett, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Quark. "The solution we've developed with Microsoft offers organizations a publishing platform that enables complete collaboration, giving subject matter experts a way to self-publish – working in Word and producing print, Web, and digital content – and giving creative teams an automated solution for managing brand assets."

Benefits to Knowledge Workers and Creative Departments
Knowledge workers and creative departments can work together by leveraging SharePoint as a single repository for content management and collaboration while using Quark Publishing System to participate directly in the publishing process.

The integrated solution makes it easy for knowledge workers to:
-- Create, edit, and copy-fit content directly into QuarkXPress layouts
-- Add images to layouts through a Web-based editor inside the SharePoint user interface
-- Create and update content in Microsoft Word that is automatically reflected in QuarkXPress layouts
-- Initiate automatic generation of print, Web, interactive, and digital output
-- Find documents by viewing thumbnails and previews of layouts

Creative teams and users associated most closely with the publishing process can:
-- Use SharePoint as the repository for all assets used in the production process, regardless of output format
-- Allocate resources, assign tasks, and communicate using SharePoint functionality
-- Continue to work in the familiar desktop tools they are productive using, such as QuarkXPress, Adobe Creative Suite, and Microsoft Office