Two hot topics, the Unified Publishing Process and vjoon K4's advanced digital asset management capabilities, figured prominently at this year's international user conference, the vjoonity. The global vjoon community convenes at the annual event to share experiences and network, with the number of industry decision-makers in attendance growing fast. What's more, another vjoonity conference is to be held in North America to bring the community even closer to customers.

Publishing industry decision-makers met on Friday, November 29, at the annual international vjoon K4 User Conference in the port city of Hamburg. Are Your Processes Lean Enough? That was the theme for this year's gathering, which attracted more than 150 guests from around the world. Keynote speaker Andreas Bayer of Porsche Consulting touched on this issue theme in his opening speech when he discussed ways in which industrial manufacturing practices can be applied to publishing. A mainstay of vjoon K4 product strategies, the Unified Publishing Process (UPP) was also the focus topic of most of the other presentations, case studies and workshops. The event was brought to a close with guests winding down from a busy day, enjoying good food in the relaxed setting of Hagenbeck Zoo's Tropical Aquarium.

As the many examples of real-world best practices impressively demonstrated, highly automated workflows can help publishers and agencies put diverse publishing strategies into action and work far more efficiently. These applications also showed how deeply vjoon K4 can be integrated into the workflows of very different companies: The major multinational publisher Condé Nast International is unifying its global publishing IT with vjoon K4. The German news magazine FOCUS from Hubert Burda Media uses it to deliver a tablet edition just a few hours after the printed magazine's deadline.

And agencies and smaller creative teams rely on this publishing software to produce premium quality corporate publications and develop special print and digital solutions. Other highlights included an exclusive demo of the latest version of vjoon K4, as well as a preview of the company's medium-to-long-term product strategy. In keeping with this strategy, the company built even more DAM capabilities into vjoon K4 and developed the technical capacity to rapidly implement larger modules that are already in the pipeline. Lectures explored the software's capabilities in great depth. They were followed by four hands-on workshops that expounded on the versatility and flexibility of vjoon K4 so that its extensive feature set was presented and discussed in the context of real-world applications.