Highlights from Craig Cline’s coverage of the recent high-altitude Quark Summit, held at 9,700 ft above sea level for large Quark customers. Among the more than 300 attendees were QuarkAlliance partners, ServicePlus members, and Quark customers owning twenty or more seat licenses. The first Quark Summit in four years, the Breckenridge, Colorado event was themed “Fresh Air, Fresh Ideas,” building on recently named CEO Kamar Aulakh’s vision for “a new Quark.”

• QuarkXPress 7 was previewed, but under such a tight non-disclosure that no one is talking about it. Cline, a consultant employed by Quark, said “it will offer some Really Cool Features.”
• Hinting at a strategy to retain the only major market in which Quark still overshadows Adobe InDesign, among the top topics were Quark Publishing System Classic 3, Quark Content Manager 3, Quark Enterprise Services Framework and Newspaper Issue and Page Planning. Quark Media Portal 3 and QuarkVista, an Xtension that allows rudimentary image editing and manipulation from within XPress, were also presented.
• Amidst the expected hoopla and circus of the Quark Summit an Executive Summit for top publishing executives was held. The sessions covered topics such as Determining the Payback on Asset Management, Developing a Content Strategy, and the Future of Publishing. Executives who chose not to attend the sessions were entertained with high-altitude jeep rides and rounds of golf ala Quark.
• [1] Hewlett-Packard has officially partnered with Quark in the pursuit of digital printing, and HP was a major sponsor of the event. Other sponsors included [2] Apple, [3] Microsoft, [4] Pantone, and top-shelf Xtension publishers.
• Quark will now allow customers to install and activate QuarkXPress 6 (and presumably QuarkXPress 7) on two (non-concurrant use) machines, thus waiving the $75 USD fee charged previously when a licensed XPress customer tried to install on another machine—say, a laptop.
• QuarkXPress 6 Japanese Edition will debut on June 24 in Tokyo.
• Later this summer XPress 6.1 bugs will be addressed by a new dot-release, QuarkXPress 6.2.
• Included in the QuarkXPress 6.2 slipstream (newly manufactured boxed product) release, and made available as free downloads to existing QuarkXPress 6 users, will be Quark Vista and QuarkXClusive, a variable data tool that hooks into the HP Indigo digital presses and lays the groundwork for the more universal PPML digital press protocol.
• Quark is actively participating in the [5] W3C, uses XML, SOAP, and Microsoft’s .NET Framework standards for interoperability and enterprise communications. Additionally Quark has joined other standards initiatives in the form of Job Definition Format’s CIP4, PPML’s PODI, and the digital asset management standard, G-SAM.
• In the last few months Quark has grown its engineering staff more than 33%, with a reported 80% focusing on enterprise workflow products.
• New Quark offices opened in New York and Hamburg, with Paris and London soon to follow.
• [6] The Quark forums, shut down last year without comment from Quark (but plenty of comments from readers), have reopened.
• Quark has tripled its customer service and technical support staff.

For the full story, read Craig Cline’s [7] report for [8] CreativePro.com