Its new features are designed to improve and solidify ease of use with other tools, such as advertising production and wire-services applications.Quark Inc. has announced the imminent release of QPS 3.5, the latest iteration of its Quark Publishing System publishing workflow software. Previewing the new release at NEXPO '05, the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference and exhibition, Quark is boasting new features, increased functionalities and expanded integration capabilities for this new version.
According to the company, QPS customers with up-to-date Quark maintenance agreements will receive the upgrade at no charge. Pricing for new customers is determined on a per-seat basis, with different price points depending on whether the potential customer purchases QPS Classic or QPS Enterprise, which offers added functionality and configuration choices. QPS Enterprise's Quark Digital Media Server uses the Oracle 9i database at its core, and the company plans to roll it out on Microsoft SQL Server as well.
Edward Owens, senior enterprise product marketing manager for the Quark QPS solution, said QPS 3.5 offers several new features and improvements of existing ones, all of which are designed to improve and solidify ease of use with other tools, such as advertising production and wire-services applications.
"QPS is like a Swiss Army knife. It allows you to build your own best-of-class solution [without] the overhead of a proprietary solution," Owens said.
Quark Connect, one of 3.5's new features, lets commonly used third-party applications, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, plug into the main QPS system, allowing for easy tracking and management.
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To reflect Quark's commitment to leveraging the usability of the different operating systems it supports, QPS 3.5 now provides AppleScript support, so that customers using Mac OS X can automate a range of database and file-server actions that enhance functionality and speed. Moreover, Apple's Xserve and related hardware are now certified for QPS, Owens said.
Quark also has improved its Notes capabilities. According to Owens, Notes follows the paradigm of the classic Post-It sticky notes down to the ability to choose different colors. However, these notes also let users assign numbers to them and provide editorial comments that accompany a document throughout the workflow process without affecting the flow itself.
QPS 3.5 offers still other features that are geared toward other vertical markets in addition to its core newspaper and magazine audience. QPS' new redlining capabilities, which help newspapers and magazines track editorial revisions, also can be used in law firms, which have certain review processes that need to be queued and managed, Owens said.
In addition, Owens said several modules are following on the heels of 3.5's release that further customize the software by offering capabilities such as output enhancement features. These features aid in configuring and storing jobs, and improving automation and XML extraction, so that print publishers can more easily migrate their content to the Web.
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