The spotlight at vjoon‘s international user conference was on efficient content creation for smart phones and web CMS as well the upcoming version of vjoon K4^®. 

Hamburg - More than 140 publishing and marketing professionals from around the world were heeding the call of the vjoonity europe’s motto, “Get inspired. Share experience. Enjoy.” and convened at Hamburg’s Sofitel hotel for this year’s event. All these vjoon K4 users took advantage of this opportunity to learn more about hot topics, trends and especially vjoon K4’s new features. Intriguing examples of real-world applications at OB//CC – move36, Les Echos Publishing, LePoint, BASF, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Red Bull Media House figured prominently on the day’s agenda. The highlight of the afternoon was the product presentation of the upcoming version 6.9 of vjoon K4. vjoon CEO Andreas Schrader then presented the company’s roadmap, affording insights into its medium- and long-term product strategy. The conference wrapped up with an evening amidst of the Le Marrakech restaurant.

Content creation for smart phones and websites
The conference kicked off with a lecture on the psychology of the online experience given by Jens Lönneker, Managing Partner of the agency rheingold salon. Walter Lorz presented the magazine Move36, which takes a multichannel approach to reach a young audience and market its content with great success. Bertrand Salliou of Les Echos Publishing discussed the ways in which his company uses vjoon K4 to prepare its highly personalized print publications, generate content and deliver it to numerous websites. The final presentation centered on Le Point, France’s leading news magazine, which automated much of its digital tablet and smart phone publishing workflow, enabling a small team to quickly tailor and deliver articles to all the different channels. These presentations were followed by breakout sessions with BASF, Bloomberg Businessweek and Red Bull Media House that zoomed in on further topics such as exporting content to web sites, integrating the TELL TIMONE planning system with vjoon K4, and professional tips on using vjoon K4 managed Excel files in tables within business reports.

Comments from participants:
“As part of the Les Echos Group, we have a lot of customers in the services industry. With vjoon K4, we are able to not only create many customer and employee magazines with printed information, but also deliver this information to various websites in highly automated ways. This is primarily native web content rather than just recycled print articles. And the Web CMS merely serves as the layout engine for this purpose.”, says Bertrand Salliou Vice Director Les Echos Publishing.=

“vjoon K4 is the most flexible workflow tool for print or digital and we think vjoon K4 is one of the best DPS integrations!”, says Olivier Bost, Director IT & Multimedia bei Le Point.

“Red Bull Media House has worked with vjoon K4 for ten years now, and we are able to constantly improve and augment our workflows thanks to the system’s flexibility, for example, with the page planning tool TIMONE TELL. I presented this project because we are very pleased with the integration. Of course, we like to share experiences such as this with other users at the vjoonity, which is why I’m always happy to come.”, says Michael Bergmeister, Production Manager at Red Bull Media House.

“Our aim for the vjoonity is to share experiences and for our customers to take home innovative ideas. We also want it to be a fun day that promotes the community spirit,” says Andreas Schrader, CEO of vjoon GmbH. “The many affirmative responses from participants confirm that we are on the right track with this concept and that we made the right decisions with our long-term product and partner strategy.”

The upcoming vjoon K4 release
The next vjoon K4 release’s new features include an extended set of table features for K4 Web Editor ICML, XMP data management, cross-client workspaces and direct output to social media channels such as Twitter. K4 Web Editor ICML is part of the K4 Web Portal, and it enables users to work on tables sourced from InCopy documents in a web browser. This new function lightens the workload, particularly for people tasked to prepare financial reports, as they can now edit figures and text in the tables of financial statements conveniently in a browser without having to launch InCopy. On top of that, XMP image metadata may now be imported and managed professionally in vjoon K4. Following up on the K4 Overview and K4 Web Editor workspaces introduced with the preceding version, this latest upgrade adds workspaces to the Adobe InDesign and InCopy plug-ins K4 Layout and K4 Edit. This enables users and user groups to work in the same environment across all clients with menu and panel settings, keyboard shortcuts and viewing modes remaining intact. Another big improvement is vjoon K4’s automated access to social media networks such as Twitter. Tweets may be generated and published automatically from ICML, HTML documents or as part of an object’s metadata. Approval processes and images can be added to the workflow on demand. Posts may be published at pre-scheduled times. Version 6.9 also allows all other automated tasks in vjoon K4 to be executed at a predetermined date and time.

A casual evening and upcoming events
Customers, partners and the entire vjoon team travelled to the restaurant Le Marrakech for a casual evening event. The next vjoonity europe will take place in November 2015 at Hamburg, preceded by the next vjoonity americas in the summer of 2015 at New York.