Hamburg - It was the twelfth time vjoon invited an audience of experts to attend presentations of real-world solutions, share experiences, and network at vjoonity. Some 150 publishing and marketing specialists heeded the call. The drone flying over the audience’s heads during the Swiss agency Medianovis’ presentation was certainly spectacular, but the day’s biggest highlight was the unveiling of the latest-generation vjoon K4^®. Version 7 was treated to a major facelift, and now comes with many new features and a new module enabling effortless approval of layouts and articles in a browser. Another focal point was the presentation of the vjoon Storage Engine, which lets users back up and recover data on the fly and at the touch of a button. 

The new software generation with K4 Approval Manager and vjoon Storage Engine 
The new K4 Approval Manager streamlines workflows by enabling layouts and page elements to be approved in a browser. This benefits many companies, and most of all those that need to coordinate their content across departmental or even company lines, for example, when working with agencies. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down—CEOs, CFOs, marketing managers, purchasers and project leaders can determine if text, images and page layouts meet their specifications and expectations, quickly and conveniently, in a browser without requiring InDesign. What’s more, Version 7 also comes with a powerful data management entity, the vjoon Storage Engine. It meets the pressing need for the means to rigorously downsize databases, to back up data on the fly, and to quickly recover these snapshots when needed. The customer is free to decide if data are archived locally, in the Amazon S3 cloud, or even in mixed environments. More details on vjoon K4 Version 7 and the vjoon Storage Engine will be released in the weeks ahead.

In the spotlight: award-winning success stories 

The SIEMENS annual report drafted by the media service provider ccs.Tirol has garnered accolades for being the best integrated report and for its efficient production. What makes this solution special is that vjoon K4 serves to automatically format the entire financial report for the Federal Gazette database so it can be delivered for publication with remarkable speed. The FOX Special Award for Workflow Efficiency went to ccs.Tirol for this efficient publishing process. The tech-savvy audience looked on in amazement as a drone took flight over their heads in an indoor air show staged by the Swiss media agency Medianovis. Its small team uses vjoon K4 and Adobe DPS for a bilingual magazine commissioned for the wandern.ch project to promote hiking, and drones to produce exciting videos for its apps. As a content marketing agency, Medianovis relies on vjoon K4 for its projects and has won many awards for its outstanding products. The breakout sessions featured presentations on professional font management with the integrated Extensis Universal Type Server and advertising media production with vjoon K4 and EasyCatalog at Globus, a specialized DIY retailer. In another session, the agency b:13 demonstrated a vjoon K4 template’s ability to automatically generate layouts for several different publications directly from InCopy, in compliance with rules of a stringent style guide.

Comments on the event:
“Topics such as approval processes and data management figure prominently in users’ day-to-day business. With vjoon K4 Version 7, K4 Approval Manager and vjoon Storage Engine, customers can make these key workflows even more efficient than ever before. And all that positive feedback at vjoonity tells me that the new concepts hit the spot,” says vjoon CEO Andreas Schrader. 

“With vjoon K4, we can automate tasks that were once labor intensive. The SIEMENS annual report is now published in record time in the Federal Gazette. We’re on an innovative path here, as the award and the positive feedback from other vjoon K4 users at vjoonity go to show,” says ccs.Tirol CEO Claus Heinrich. 

ProzessPiraten CEO Tobias Heimpel: “Efficient IT support is elementary in the digital age. It is gradually permeating practically every flow of everyday life. But beware: Technology is merely an implement for putting visionary ideas into practice. The ways in which IT and technology create space for these ideas were shown at vjoonity.” 

Wrap-up and evening event: 
An interesting day filled of real-world success stories, new products and a glimpse of the future wrapped up with an evening get-together on the panorama deck of EMPORIO Hamburg’s 23rd floor. Guests gathered at the buffet to meet, greet and swap stories, letting the day wind down while taking in views of the city and the port of Hamburg.