A new location and a new concept attracted more than 10,000 visitors to Hamburg's IFRA Expo, many of whom headed straight for vjoon's stand. The company's offering was a perfect fit for IFRA Expo's 40th anniversary show, where a host of innovations were on display. vjoon also featured a persuasive showcase of trailblazing innovations, as many publishing houses and media industry decision-makers will attest.

Most visitors were eager to learn more about the Unified Publishing Process, a novel publishing strategy recently unveiled by the company, and particularly how it relates to tablet publishing. Industry players were interested in finding out how efficiently tablet publishing can be integrated into real-world production processes; that is, how it works with other channels, different platforms, and under deadline pressure. vjoon answered these questions by showing its ability to control and manage the workflow, automated processes, and the entire production environment from front to end, from the inceptive design to final delivery.

Live demos at the stand afforded visitors the opportunity to experience the benefits of vjoon K4's integration with the Digital Magazine Solution from Adobe, for example, by sparing them time-consuming routine tasks. In addition, today K4 is already able to adapt digital editions' page formats automatically and flexibly to every tablet format, to include converting units of measure, styles, and much more. Many visitors were delighted with this streamlining capability, especially in light of emerging platforms' diversity. What's more, the process of bundling individual pages into the magazine issue is automated, freeing layout people and editors to devote their time and resources to creative tasks. All programming effort and manual labor falls by the wayside.

Another frequently asked - and easily answered - question was how editors supervise the production process: K4 Overview presents the layout and text variants of all print and tablet editions for review. Editors and project managers can then use digital sticky notes to post comments and revisions for authors, layout designers, and other editors. If necessary, all contributors can exchange messages via a live chat. This feature comes in particularly handy for productions where speed matters and deadlines loom large.

"There was tremendous interest in our innovations, as our tight schedule with a calendar chock-full of appointments attests," notes Andreas Schrader, CEO of vjoon. "The many light-bulb moments experienced by visitors during live demos also showed that we provide satisfying answers to many pressing questions, as well as inspire decision-makers. Of course, our success stories with projects for customers such as Red Bulletin and Credit Suisse also helped."

Future customers were especially pleased to learn that Version 6.3, as presented at the IFRA Expo, contains all the K4 features necessary for tablet publishing. These are standard, and come at no extra cost.

Another highlight at the vjoon stand was the live demo of the K4 Distributed Enterprise System (K4 DES). It affords users enormous time savings because entire layouts - including all pictures, graphics, video files, and articles - are opened from local data storages that have been synchronized worldwide. Using local data storages is far faster than retrieving a file from a remote central server, which is common practice with most publishing systems. Access times can easily be accelerated tenfold or more, depending on transmission capacity and system configuration. Here too, the K4 system puts on a thoroughly convincing performance that impressed visitors.