Jenkintown PA (October 3 2007) – Managing Editor Inc. (MEI) an Adobe Systems portfolio company and a leading provider of software solutions for the publishing industry hosted the Pro Pub Summit™ 2007 on Sept. 27-28 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. The third annual conference for users of the SoftCare K4 Publishing System in the Americas featured a day and a half of panels and presentations that covered a wide range of topics and issues facing end-users technicians and publishers tied together by a focus on how the system can enable multi-channel publishing.
The Pro Pub Summit drew more than 170 attendees representing more than 60 companies including major magazine book and newspaper publishers. Based on positive customer response MEI is already planning to extend next year’s Summit to two full days.
The growth in Summit content reflects the growth in the K4 customer base in the past year. Today the K4 community in North America has grown to 115 systems supporting 7 700 users with a worldwide total of 230 systems and 12 700 users.
As in years past the Pro Pub Summit included presentations from experts and integrators who offered perspectives and pointers on how to get the most out of K4. Additionally attendees had an exclusive opportunity to hear from K4 peers regarding their own experiences specialized configurations best practices and helpful tips.
This year’s agenda emphasized K4 as the core of a multimedia content creation and management system demonstrated by publishers such as BusinessWeek and Congressional Quarterly who are already using the system to create and manage print Web and other types of electronic content. K4’s versatility was also showcased highlighting integration with products from companies such as Clickability 5fifteen and Really Strategies.
“The Summit was designed to show K4 in a larger context as a way to manage information not just for print but also for Web podcasts radio television and more ” said Mark Leister senior vice president of business development at MEI. “We wanted a forum for presenting those K4 users who are currently benefiting from these types of workflows and it was exciting to see enthusiastic interest from the other publishers who will soon be experiencing those same benefits.”
New this year was a second day of sessions and the division of those sessions into specialized tracks — one track for K4 technicians covering more specialized aspects of the solution and a second track targeted toward end-users and their skill sets.
“What especially came to life this year was the exchange of information from those using K4 ” said Diane Reus Senior Analyst Editorial and Production Applications at Condé Nast. “The panels workshops and coffee breaks made for a rich flow of ideas and practices for varying workflows. The focus on readying our businesses and K4 for as yet even unknown content production imparted a sense of being pioneers in publishing.”
The Pro Pub Summit also provided users with an outlet for delivering feedback straight to the source. Both Andreas Schrader managing director and founder of SoftCare the Germany-based developer of K4 and Gary Cosimini business development manager for Adobe Systems returned for their third summits providing information on software development and fielding comments and feature requests. Also present was Ulrich Zimmer CEO and founding partner of SNAP Innovation developer of the PrimeBase database management system.
“Each year I’ve been impressed with the organization that went in to bringing off the event ” Reus said. “This year included a more diverse agenda but everything went according to clockwork. Setting the stage so skillfully made it a pleasure to move from room to room and event to event.”
About K4
The SoftCare K4 Publishing System integrated with Adobe InDesign and InCopy allows publishing professionals to manage design and editorial workflow and to control the entire production process. With its multi-level security controls open SQL architecture and robust customization options K4 supports a transparent and secure production workflow for individual workgroups or entire publishing enterprises. K4 is a product of SoftCare GmbH of Hamburg Germany. MEI is the exclusive distributor of K4 in the Americas with more than 100 installations managing nearly 7 500 users.
About MEI
Managing Editor Inc. is an industry leader in the development of quality proven software solutions for the evolving publishing industry. The Page Director® Series of Advertising and Classified Layout Systems K4 Publishing System AdsUp® order-entry and CRM system Integrated Production Suite (IPS) Wave2 self-serve advertising platform and IPS AdTrac deliver automated pagination workflow customer relations and digital asset management solutions to newspaper and magazine publishers as well as to other print and electronic publishing markets. MEI is a portfolio company of Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) and has twice been named a laureate of the Computerworld Smithsonian Collections. Additional information regarding MEI’s products and services can be found on the company’s Web site at http://www.maned.com.
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