SoftCare Becomes vjoon, K4 Becomes Multimedia Platform

By: E&P Staff Publishing software developer SoftCare, Hamburg, Germany, has been rebranded as vjoon, and the company identified its Xanthos project as the 6.0 version of its K4 system.

"We have turned K4 into a publishing platform that can flexibly handle continuously evolving editorial structures and individually control and fill any number of media channels," vjoon GmbH Managing Director and CEO Andreas Schrader said in a statement.

Founded in 1990, the company develops workflow solutions based on Adobe Creative Suite. Its K4 editorial system evolved into a publishing platform for multiple media channels. The smaller K2 solution is a base product for those moving into professional publishing. K2 and K4 support Macintosh OS X and Windows clients in mixed environments, as well as all established server platforms. For local system support, vjoon relies on a worldwide network of K4 integrators.

Vjoon calls version 6.0 "the most important release in its company history," noting that it was developed for Adobe Creative Suite 4.0. Rather than being status-based, version 6.0 assigns specific tasks to employees for editing text, image and layout documents, marking a major change for vjoon that ends the practice of checking documents in and out. Instead, it focuses on the user's perspective. For editorial environments using freelancers and external agencies, where users often barely have time to become familiar with a new publishing system, task assignment "makes the publishing process more realistic, intuitive, and consequently, much easier," according to vjoon. To avoid long waits, K4 also allows for dividing tasks.

The new version's split workflow is fundamental to its cross-media publishing. Unlike version 5.9, which allowed print content to be exported to the Web or to an archive, 6.0 can split workflows for all K4 objects (e.g., articles, images, layouts) for corresponding media channels, and it recognizes dependencies between workflows. If, say, an online story is sufficiently prepared for a print edition and is to be read into the layout by the final editor, but the corresponding image has not yet been authorized, the system will report as much and alert the user. Any number of workflows can be created for any object type.

K4 also is documenting its capabilities with its standard interfaces via Web services for connectivity to third-party systems. The new intuitive user interface aims to simplify K4 administration. Templates and wizards ensure that daily chores such as creating new user profiles can be done efficiently. Vjoon says K4 6.0 includes almost 40 other new features.