Europe's leading IT publisher rolls out Quark Content Manager
VNU selects Quark Enterprise Solutions for cross-media strategy
AMSTERDAM - 5/10/2005 - "Quark Inc. announced today that VNU Business Media Europe, Europe's largest IT publisher, has successfully implemented Quark Content Manager (QCM) for all of its UK magazine titles and is now rolling out the solution across all of its European publishing divisions.
""Content is our most important asset, and with today's changing publishing environment, managing, storing, reusing, and syndicating content efficiently is essential."" said Ajit Patel, VNU's chief technology officer. ""We believe that Quark Content Manager is the best publishing-focused content management solution on the market today, and as such is enabling VNU to achieve its multi-channel vision and move ahead of our competitors."" The UK division of VNU has been the company's primary test site for QCM in Europe. VNU has been in live production with QCM in the UK for several months. Each magazine title now stores and manages all of its content within QCM, including QuarkXPress, image, text, and Word files. In fact, QCM can store just about any file type that the company chooses. QCM is also enabling the automated creation of high- and low-resolution PDFs for print and eBooks through the integration of Callas' AutoPilot and OneVision's Asura, as well as XML generation and automatic content feeds to PDAs and VNU's Web sites and syndication partners. Syndication made easy One of the important functions that QCM performs for VNU is content syndication. VNU content is syndicated to more than 100 countries. QCM has a Web-based client to access all of the content stored and managed within QCM. Through user-controlled access rights, all of VNU's syndication partners around the world can log on to the Web client and instantly access the syndicated content. VNU employees and freelance writers are also using the Web-based client to access and work on content remotely. ""VNU is a visionary company that very early on recognized how important cross-media publishing and digital media would be to their future,"" said Matthew Wallis, Quark European VP of sales. ""By implementing a cross-media publishing solution, VNU now has a business platform that brings it real business advantages in what is a fiercely competitive market."" European-wide implementation VNU has now successfully implemented QCM across all of its UK titles with 50 concurrent users on the system. The rollout in the Netherlands is already well under way, and Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium will follow. Eventually more than 80 VNU publications across Europe will be using QCM, driving content to over 100 VNU Web sites. Quark Digital Integration Toolkit For cross-media publishing to work effectively, it is essential that content can be stored separately from the presentation of that content. The natural format for achieving this is XML. This capability is at the heart of QCM and VNU's strategy. Along with QCM, VNU uses Quark Data Integration Toolkit, software that essentially takes an input content source, such as an SQL database or Excel spreadsheet, and transforms it into XML. Through an easy-to-use visual interface, content can be mapped to and transformed from the source content to a defined XML structure. This capability makes Quark Data Integration Toolkit the ideal tool for converting VNU's print content into an XML format suitable for publishing to the company's Web sites and e-mail messages, uploading to PDAs, or syndicating to other publishers and information providers. ""We believe that Quark Data Integration Toolkit is Quark's most exciting product. Its potential is enormous and that is saying something considering the breadth and depth of Quark's current product range,"" said Patel. VNU representatives estimate that by using Quark Data Integration Toolkit to perform the data-conversion processes that many publishers outsource at �200-�300 per issue, they are saving an additional �20-30K a year on data conversion alone. About Quark Content Manager (QCM) Quark Content Manager is an enterprise-class content management system that is ideally suited to the challenges confronting organizations that invest a considerable amount of time and money in publishing to print, Web, or both. It provides cross-media publishing and allows users to publish to print and the Web while sharing and repurposing content across media types. For more information about Quark's range of enterprise technologies, visit the company Web site at www.quark.com/products/. About VNU Business Media Europe VNU Business Media Europe is the leading European technology publisher in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Belgium in advertising and readership market share. In these seven countries, the company publishes approximately 70 trade magazines - all together about 70 million copies per year. VNU Exhibitions Europe is the No. 1 business-to-business exhibition company in the Netherlands and a leading exhibition organizer in Europe with more than 70 trade exhibitions in the Netherlands, the UK, and Italy. VNU Exhibitions Europe is also the founding company and majority shareholder in VNU Exhibitions Asia based in Shanghai. Online, VNU has VNUNet portals in every territory. In the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the company also operates five major recruitment Web sites. About Quark Quark Inc. (www.quark.com) is a leading developer of tools and technologies for collaborative content workflows from the desktop to the enterprise. Quark has been providing award-winning software for professional publishers since its flagship product QuarkXPress changed the course of traditional publishing. Today, as Quark software is used by millions of customers around the world, the company is guiding the creation of vital open standards to promote productivity and interoperability throughout the industry. With a new generation of products and solutions, Quark is helping its customers create, manage, personalize, and distribute content to a variety of media formats and devices at low cost. Founded in 1981, Denver-based Quark Inc. is privately held. ### Quark and Quark-related marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Quark Inc. and all applicable affiliated companies, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. and in many other countries. All other marks are the properties of their respective owners."