What I was saying was that this has been Quark’s focus for 9 years—this didn’t just come out the past few months to coincide with Ray’s tenure. I know because we were implementing early versions of these kinds of solutions with QuarkDMS and QuarkDDS many years ago, and we were having discussions with their executives back then about the same kinds of solutions.

For instance, as early as 2000 Quark had a product called DIT by the way, that would trade purely in XML into and out of QuarkXPress integrated with their DMS product. It didn’t require integration with DMS, but it was one example of what could be done.

I could probably go into my archives to pull up past press releases that Quark sent out from 1999 – 2005 on this very subject—and I’ll do it just for you if you’d like me to of course.

I am not trying to belittle what Ray is trying to do there at Quark—I’d love for him to be successful. My point is that media-independent publishing has been a core focus of Quark’s for a long time, and the trade in XML has also been core to that.  DITA is a relatively new (and exciting) standard so it makes sense for Quark to embrace it.

I’d love for you to take a look at what Comcast has been doing with regard to media-independent publishing in their marcom group. They have built a custom content management system using .NET (their choice to custom build), they have Artesia as their DAM repository, and they are using Quark Server and InDesign Server to dynamically generate versions of direct mail tactics. The content is all stored as XML. That XML is used not only for their print tactics but also for delivery of the same campaign information to their Website, for their email campaigns, and even for their TV ad versioning via Visible World technologies. This isn’t the only case study of a company doing this kind of work. Obviously not repeatable since its more of an integrators solution than a product. Dozens of companies doing that I’m aware of.

Anyway, I wish Quark the best since I would love for them to be successful again. They had brilliant people a few years back, too, but they had operational difficulties that stemmed from organizational demons that I hope they are conquering.

What I’d really love to see is for Quark to go public…

You are missing something. And, I bet it will become more clear as time passes. Quark has been on the trade show circuit helping folks understand their new focus.

For folks in the content creation business, Quark has been viewed as a player in desktop publishing, not XML authoring, nor content management, nor email delivery, etc.

The news is the leadership is almost entirely made up of folks from Arbortext, including a few brilliant structured content experts and content management evangelists who bring years or experience Quark may have been lacking in previous years.

To folks in technical communication, for instance, it might seem strange to hear Quark talk about XML standards like DITA because they never have (to our audience) in the past. So, the news is exciting to some , but perhaps not you. Each of us plays a different role in the content lifeycycle and sees things through our own lens. I appreciate your viewpoint, but don’t share your lack of enthusiasm. For me and my clients, Quark moving toward an end-to-end content solution is something we’ve been waiting for.

Why? Because NO COMPANY has done it well—yet. The more that try, the better the final result. I see a day when an end-to-end solution will be available to me, hopefully, via a web browser. But for now, I’m excited to see some movement in the right direction by Quark, which I hope will convince other firms to also develop similar product frameworks.

As far as the in.vision partnership, again this reads like a marketing ploy. Quark tried years ago to build a MS Word interface that would interact with both QuarkDMS (QCM) and Quark Publishing System. The reason had more to do with the aging code base of Quark CopyDesk, but it was a good idea since most authors use MS Word—at least presently. In any event, I don’t have an objection to what Quark is doing with that partnership, but it isn’t bringing anything new to the table—extending the MS Office System 2007 for media-independent publishing is being done all over the place in a number of different scenarios. Not trying to critique in.vision’s solution here, but lets get real, folks.

As far as the al Fresco partnership, again, more marketing. Quark needed a willing partner there and they did look far and wide. There is nothing particularly competitive about al Fresco’s technology that is making this easier for Quark. The integration could happen whether it be done with Drupal, Vignette, Interwoven, FatWire, or any of the Web content management systems on the market for that matter (including custom solutions), provided that they deal in XML and can expose and consume Web services (or have relevant API’s).

Again, I’m not critiquing al Fresco’s solution in the least, or even the novel bundling that seems to be going on here by Quark. Its just that I don’t see anything Earth-shattering here that isn’t being done elsewhere.

Just so everyone is clear, Quark has been in the business of workgroup and enterprise solutions at least since 1992 or so. Among their solutions that have served enterprises include Quark Publishing System, Quark DMS, QCM, eStage, Mirim, and others.

Quark caught a great deal of flak from 1998-2005 with unstable builds of many of those products as well as versions not working with their newer releases of desktop products. Right at the tail end of that period, Quark retracted from the server products—principally QDMS/QCM—to focus on its desktop line of business, possibly to stabilize the hemmorhaging that happened when Adobe came out with the Creative Suite bundling with InDesign.

The server line of products was almost Quark’s undoing, so I’m sure that they will need to tread lightly this time around. Also, whether it be through partnership or core technologies that Quark plans to build or enhance, the company will have a difficult time convincing customers to come back to them, especially since what they are marketing is already available in the marketplace.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. What I see is not what you see, and that’s okay. My clients are always looking for solutions that meet their needs (not yours, not mine, but theirs). Sometimes, that’s an Adobe-focused solution, sometimes it’s not. As I work closely with both Quark and Adobe, I’m quite confident in my assertion that Quark is ahead of the game (if Adobe wanted to be in that space, they could have taken the lead a long time ago and implemented this approach across the Technical Communication Suite—but they didn’t. They might now that Quark is in the game. But the CS Suite related tools are hardly end-to-end. And msot creative people are still NOT creating modular XML components of content individually managed by a system from cradle to grave.

That said, it is a big market and there are many different interpretations of what an end-to-end solution is. Mine idea of what constitutes “beginning” and “end” obviously varies from yours.

We’ll be featuring an interview with the Adobe team on this blog shortly. We’ll let Adobe tell our readers where they’re heading and what they are—and aren’t—doing.

Of course, relying on “many arrows” isn’t a bad program unless the arrows are time-sucking, wasteful, inefficient products that cause us to perform manual tasks that should/could be automated and/or that help us introduce errors instead of control quality. Technical communicators need to get over the idea that we have an understanding of good business practices when it is clear that we do not, as an industry, have any clue. After all, why would we use Excel to collect metrics, email to schedule meetings, or unstructured content to produce technical communication products if we cared about being productive.

And, the larger companies are very much interested. We’ll have some great case studies over the coming year or so and we’ll share them here and on our new social network (http://thecontentwrangler.ning.com).

Of course, the software field changes rapidly. Let’s see what happens next. Anyone like a peek into my crystal ball?