SoftCare has Turned Into vjoon

PRESS RELEASE

The more than 150 vis­i­tors at the 4th International K4 User Conference, held on Friday in Hamburg, were sur­prised to learn that Hamburg-based soft­ware house SoftCare has rebrand­ed as vjoon. The com­pa­ny also revealed what its Xanthos project stands for: the rev­o­lu­tion­ary pub­lish­ing plat­form and lat­est sys­tem ver­sion K4 6.0. The pub­lic will have a chance to see vjoon K4 6.0, sup­port­ing Adobe CS4, from October 27 to 30 at the IFRA Expo in Amsterdam (Hall 10/Booth 10330). At the tradeshow, vjoon will present inno­v­a­tive cross-media strate­gies togeth­er with its part­ners AD HOC, axaio, CoreMedia, GrafiData, MEI, NeoGeo, PCI, SNAP, SYSPRO, and Topix. 

“vjoon stands for our mis­sion — vision, val­ue and coop­er­a­tion,” said Andreas Schrader, Managing Director and CEO of vjoon GmbH, explain­ing the name change from SoftCare. “We have become so much more than just a com­pa­ny pro­duc­ing a pub­lish­ing 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.” When the com­pa­ny was first estab­lished in 1990, then as SoftCare, it fol­lowed a vision. The com­pa­ny was one of the first to devel­op plug-ins for Adobe and to inte­grate edi­to­r­i­al solu­tions. Today, more than 300 K4 sys­tems are installed world­wide at pub­lish­ing hous­es and cor­po­rate pub­lish­ers. K4 users, dis­tri­b­u­tion and tech­nol­o­gy part­ners, as well as poten­tial K4 cus­tomers had trav­eled from all over the world, com­ing from many places in Germany, but also from the United States, Russia, Malaysia, Great Britain, France, Benelux and many oth­er coun­tries, to attend the annu­al event in Hamburg, which pre­sent­ed the lat­est K4 ver­sion along with inter­est­ing user case studies.

Xanthos is the com­plete­ly new set-up of K4
With ver­sion 6.0, vjoon is com­ing out with the most impor­tant release in its com­pa­ny his­to­ry. K4 6.0, which was specif­i­cal­ly devel­oped for Adobe Creative Suite 4.0, rep­re­sents a work­flow rev­o­lu­tion. In con­trast to all known edi­to­r­i­al and pub­lish­ing sys­tems in the mar­ket, K4 6.0 is not status-based, but assigns spe­cif­ic tasks to employ­ees for edit­ing text, image and lay­out doc­u­ments. This marks a change of par­a­digm for vjoon that dis­con­tin­ues the prac­tice of check­ing doc­u­ments in and out, and instead focus­es on the user‘s per­spec­tive. In mod­ern edi­to­r­i­al envi­ron­ments with free­lancers and exter­nal agen­cies, users often bare­ly have time to become famil­iar with a new pub­lish­ing sys­tem. The assign­ment of tasks makes the pub­lish­ing process more real­is­tic, intu­itive, and con­se­quent­ly, much eas­i­er. To avoid long wait­ing times, vjoon K4 also allows for divid­ing tasks, with parcels com­plet­ed inde­pen­dent­ly. As an exam­ple, the prepa­ra­tion of an image for the Internet can be divid­ed into ren­der­ing the image data for opti­mal Web res­o­lu­tion and cit­ing an image source. Once the image is ren­dered, it is ready for fur­ther pro­cess­ing; for exam­ple, to add a cap­tion. However, the image will not be export­ed to the Web until it is autho­rized with an image credit.

Serve all Media with Split Workflow
The split work­flow of K4 6.0 is fun­da­men­tal to the product’s func­tion as a cross-media pub­lish­ing plat­form. In con­trast to ver­sion K4 5.9, which allowed for export­ing print con­tent to the Web or to be archived, K4 6.0 is able to split work­flows for all K4 objects, such as arti­cles, images, or lay­outs, for cor­re­spond­ing media chan­nels and even rec­og­nizes depen­den­cies between indi­vid­ual work­flows. For exam­ple, if an Internet arti­cle is suf­fi­cient­ly pre­pared for the print edi­tion of a news­pa­per or mag­a­zine 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 the “prob­lem” and noti­fy the user. Any num­ber of work­flows can be cre­at­ed in K4 6.0 for any of the object types. 

In addi­tion to the pio­neer­ing con­cept of a task-based work­flow and the option to split the work­flow for indi­vid­ual objects or media chan­nels, vjoon K4 is doc­u­ment­ing its trend-setting capac­i­ties with its stan­dard inter­faces via Web ser­vices, which guar­an­tees flex­i­ble con­nec­tiv­i­ty to third-party sys­tems. The new intu­itive user inter­face also is an impor­tant step toward sim­pli­fy­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of K4. The many tem­plates and wiz­ards ensure that dai­ly chores such as cre­at­ing new user pro­files can be done quick­ly and effi­cient­ly. Furthermore, vjoon K4 6.0 includes anoth­er near­ly 40 new fea­tures that make work eas­i­er. A mod­ern multi-tier-architecture and the use of Java and AJAX form the basis of this new bench­mark in publishing.

About vjoon
vjoon (for­mer­ly SoftCare), found­ed in 1990, is the world­wide lead­ing devel­op­er of work­flow solu­tions based on Adobe Creative Suite. The German com­pa­ny, locat­ed in the Hamburg Metropolitan Region, has evolved its most pop­u­lar prod­uct, K4, from an edi­to­r­i­al sys­tem to a pub­lish­ing plat­form that can han­dle as many media chan­nels as request­ed. It com­bines effi­cient meth­ods of work­ing with proven time and cost advan­tages for mag­a­zine, news­pa­per, book and cor­po­rate pub­lish­ers. vjoon’s small­er solu­tion K2 pro­vides an excel­lent base prod­uct for peo­ple enter­ing the world of pro­fes­sion­al pub­lish­ing. K4 is already suc­cess­ful­ly in use with instal­la­tions rang­ing from ten to more than 1,000 users. Publications using K4 include Playboy, BusinessWeek, New York Magazine, Focus, Capital, ADACmotorwelt, DIE ZEIT, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Le Point, while cor­po­rate pub­lish­ers include Akzo Nobel, Addison, Publicis, BASF, KircherBurkhardt and Beiersdorf. K2 and K4 both sup­port MAC OS X and Windows clients in mixed envi­ron­ments as well as all estab­lished serv­er plat­forms. In order to guar­an­tee high-quality sys­tem sup­port at a local lev­el, vjoon is work­ing with a world­wide net­work of qual­i­fied K4 inte­gra­tors. Find out more at www​.vjoon​.com.