Prepress
UNICEF Chooses Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution and DITA to Strengthen the Presentation of Child-focused Programming Information
Tuesday 20. April 2010 - Quark announced today that UNICEF, the worlds largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, is using Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (Quark DPS) to design, author, and publish critical documentation that informs partners of UNICEFs initiatives. Quark DPS enables UNICEF to use Microsoft Word to create DITA content that can be stored, managed, and dynamically assembled into personalised, richly designed communications that can be delivered to partners in multiple formats.
By replacing their time-intensive publishing process based on the manual assembly of information with Quarks dynamic publishing solution, UNICEF streamlined and automated their publishing process so they can now:
* Support and respond to partners
* Repurpose content across print and online channels
* Standardise the look and feel of investment cases
* Ensure accuracy and timeliness of information around investment cases
* Maintain version control across the organisation
* Adhere to brand consistency standards
“Due to the nature of our role as an international relief group, our work is fast-paced and we are under tremendous deadlines. Our partners are the foundation of the aid we are able to provide children and women in peril, and we simply do not have the resources to sustain a communication process that requires us to recreate content each time a partner contacts us. Therefore, we implemented a publishing strategy that allows us to create richly designed, personalised, and compelling partner communications that can be ready on-demand. We view Quarks Dynamic Publishing Solution as an enterprise communications framework, with the potential for helping UNICEF drive efficiency across many of our global operations,” said Stephen Fridakis, Chief IT Programs, UNICEF.
UNICEF chose DITA-based XML as a means to author reusable content that can be managed easily within a content management system or repository. DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) embeds intelligence in the content that UNICEF creates so that it can be stored, searched, and reused across multiple types of media, both print and electronic. Because the UNICEF team is adept at creating its partner information in Microsoft Word, they adopted Quark XML Author, an add-in to Microsoft Word that allows anyone familiar with Word to author DITA content easily, without having knowledge of XML.
The DITA content that UNICEF creates is managed in a hosted environment provided by Quark. When a partner submits a request for information, the UNICEF team can quickly access relevant content from a simple and easy-to-use Web interface and publish the content as a PDF or as HTML.
“By choosing DITA and Quark DPS, UNICEF was able to transform a disjointed and time-consuming publishing process into one that saves significant time and serves funding partners more efficiently,” said PG Bartlett, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Quark.
As a part of their implementation of Quark DPS, UNICEF also uses QuarkXPress to design standardised templates, and QuarkXPress Server to render tailored communications for funding partners.