Hamburg, Germany (January 29th, 2004) -- Today, SoftCare announces the release of version 5.0 of the K4 Publishing System, a new standard for professional publishing workflows. The new version offers support for Adobe InDesign CS and Adobe InCopy CS, and comes with an impressive set of new features and enhancements. New features include improved support for ad, image and multimedia objects, enhanced use of XML for structuring content, and new workflow capabilities for other file types such as word processing and spreadsheet files. "In a tight production environment, it is essential to keep track of images and ads included on the page," says Andreas Schrader, Managing Director at SoftCare. "K4 version 5.0 offers fully customizable status workflows and metadata handling for images and ads, increasing workflow integrity as well as further improving K4's adaptability to specific workflow requirements." In addition, K4 will also allow a specific workflow for multimedia elements such as movies and audio, which can be embedded in InDesign CS layouts to come to life in PDFs or on Web pages. With the system's enhanced use of XML, content can be structured hierarchically, so that a story is organized into all its parts, with captions and photo credits associated to their photo. Templates can be pre-tagged, saving considerable time when creating new layouts or articles. The XML information is stored in the system and can be pulled directly from the database by third-party systems for easy re-use of content, e.g. for archiving or web publishing. A new Java-based File Manager client enables users to check in and out any type of file to and from the K4 database and route it through a fully customizable status workflow. With this new client, Microsoft Word manuscripts, Excel spreadsheets, or any other type of file can be managed within the system, centralizing publishing content and making the system available to all participants in the process. Thus, K4 offers unprecedented flexibility for a broad range of professional publishing environments. K4 is available from authorized K4 System Integrators in Europe and the USA. A list of K4 System Integrators as well as more information about new features is available on the SoftCare web site.