Quark + SharePoint = New Multi-Channel Publishing Solution

By Barb Mosher | Published Oct 16, 2009

Quark + SharePoint = New Multi-Channel Publishing Solution You are constantly being told that SharePoint is more than a simple document management and collaboration solution. It's a platform. Well here's an example of just what SharePoint (news, site) is capable of when it is leveraged as a platform.

Microsoft teamed up with Quark (news, site), a provider of publishing solutions, to demonstrate a new solution that supports publishers and multi-channel publishing.

The Best From Both Worlds

At the IFRAExpo, a conference for publishers, Microsoft and Quark came together to provide a demonstration of how their solutions can work together to support journalists and provide a multi-channel publishing environment.

The solution was built using SharePoint, Microsoft's Unified Communications platform (UC), Quark's Dynamic Publishing Solution (Quark DPS) and XML Author.

It's pretty obvious what each brings to the table: SharePoint for collaboration, XML Author for authoring, DPS for multi-channel publishing and UC for integrated communications (IM, voice, email, video conferencing, MS Office integration and more).

An Integrated Solution

This is a real solution, not just something created for a publishers conference. The pieces fit together to support the use of existing technologies — we know that many organizations use SharePoint for instance.

Here's a quick look at the functionality provided in this new solution.

Collaboration: sharing ideas, monitoring RSS feeds, tracking events and planning coverage, finding resources, searching for content and SMEs, workflow
Communication: seamless communications through a number of different channels
Authoring: creating new content that can be deployed to multiple channels using XML
Publishing: professionally designed output using Quark DPS for different channels

An important note is that this solution will work with SharePoint 2010.

All the Right Reasons

This new partnership does create a viable publishing solution for all the right reasons. SharePoint as a collaboration platform, complete with document management and workflow is fairly easy to use and is already used in many organizations.

And Quark is a well known vendor for publishing solutions, which includes their XML Author (integrated with a number of enterprise content management system) and their Dynamic Publishing System.

We talk a lot these days about the publishing industry and their struggle to find relevant business models to keep alive. Providing solutions like this should help from both a news sourcing and multi-channel publishing point of view.

We are only disappointed we can't see what it looks like. The conference is over, so it's time to get up some video or screenshots.