QuarkXPress 7 & Highlights From Quark Summit

Highlights from Craig Cline’s cov­er­age of the recent high-altitude Quark Summit, held at 9,700 ft above sea lev­el for large Quark cus­tomers. Among the more than 300 atten­dees were QuarkAlliance part­ners, ServicePlus mem­bers, and Quark cus­tomers own­ing twen­ty or more seat licens­es. The first Quark Summit in four years, the Breckenridge, Colorado event was themed “Fresh Air, Fresh Ideas,” build­ing on recent­ly named CEO Kamar Aulakh’s vision for “a new Quark.”

• QuarkXPress 7 was pre­viewed, but under such a tight non-disclosure that no one is talk­ing about it. Cline, a con­sul­tant employed by Quark, said “it will offer some Really Cool Features.”
• Hinting at a strat­e­gy to retain the only major mar­ket in which Quark still over­shad­ows Adobe InDesign, among the top top­ics were Quark Publishing System Classic 3, Quark Content Manager 3, Quark Enterprise Services Framework and Newspaper Issue and Page Planning. Quark Media Portal 3 and QuarkVista, an Xtension that allows rudi­men­ta­ry image edit­ing and manip­u­la­tion from with­in XPress, were also presented.
• Amidst the expect­ed hoopla and cir­cus of the Quark Summit an Executive Summit for top pub­lish­ing exec­u­tives was held. The ses­sions cov­ered top­ics such as Determining the Payback on Asset Management, Developing a Content Strategy, and the Future of Publishing. Executives who chose not to attend the ses­sions were enter­tained with high-altitude jeep rides and rounds of golf ala Quark.
• Hewlett-Packard has offi­cial­ly part­nered with Quark in the pur­suit of dig­i­tal print­ing, and HP was a major spon­sor of the event. Other spon­sors includ­ed Apple, Microsoft, Pantone, and top-shelf Xtension publishers.
• Quark will now allow cus­tomers to install and acti­vate QuarkXPress 6 (and pre­sum­ably QuarkXPress 7) on two (non-concurrant use) machines, thus waiv­ing the $75 USD fee charged pre­vi­ous­ly when a licensed XPress cus­tomer tried to install on anoth­er machine–say, a laptop.
• QuarkXPress 6 Japanese Edition will debut on June 24 in Tokyo.
• Later this sum­mer XPress 6.1 bugs will be addressed by a new dot-release, QuarkXPress 6.2.
• Included in the QuarkXPress 6.2 slip­stream (new­ly man­u­fac­tured boxed prod­uct) release, and made avail­able as free down­loads to exist­ing QuarkXPress 6 users, will be Quark Vista and QuarkXClusive, a vari­able data tool that hooks into the HP Indigo dig­i­tal press­es and lays the ground­work for the more uni­ver­sal PPML dig­i­tal press protocol.
• Quark is active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the W3C, uses XML, SOAP, and Microsoft’s .NET Framework stan­dards for inter­op­er­abil­i­ty and enter­prise com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Additionally Quark has joined oth­er stan­dards ini­tia­tives in the form of Job Definition Format’s CIP4, PPML’s PODI, and the dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment stan­dard, G‑SAM.
• In the last few months Quark has grown its engi­neer­ing staff more than 33%, with a report­ed 80% focus­ing on enter­prise work­flow products.
• New Quark offices opened in New York and Hamburg, with Paris and London soon to follow.
• The Quark forums, shut down last year with­out com­ment from Quark (but plen­ty of com­ments from read­ers), have reopened.
• Quark has tripled its cus­tomer ser­vice and tech­ni­cal sup­port staff.

For the full sto­ry, read Craig Cline’s report for CreativePro​.com