Quark Publishing System

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The Quark Publishing System (commonly know as acronym QPS) is a workflow mangagement system, mostly used by magazine editorial staffs but also occasionally found at newspapers, book publishers, catalog companies, advertising agencies and others.

QPS® Classic is a cross-platform workgroup publishing solution that streamlines workflow and provides tools to manage workloads. It incorporates a central repository for content with modules for file management, file locking, monitoring, tracking, version control, revision management, page design, and copyediting. One large innovation/advantage of the system was that QPS allows layout artists and editors to work at the same document at the same time.

The system is configurable by end users/administrators and IT professionals with a fairly modest amount of training. It is very flexible and has become more stable since having been launched, in 2004, as an OSX product for the Macintosh. Previous versions of QPS were notorious for various bugs and crashes that required strict adherence to certain procedures and maintenance.

QPS was first released in 1991 by Quark, Inc. after having been beta-tested at BusinessWeek (and others?) in the late 1980's. The product was long considered the market leader with over 900 sites worldwide and over 50,000 seats sold. For the first decade of it's existence QPS was more or less without competitors. Although some companies did offer similarly conceived workflow systems, most of those were designed/developed with the newspaper market in mind. One such product was Saxopress. Adobe ran a beta-testing program at Time Inc around 2000 (also a heavy user of QPS) that was not immediately successful. This project later became known as K4, which using Adobe's InDesign software finally provided an alternative to Quark's industry standard product.

QPS now supports Mac and Windows Clients, editors can use QuarkXPress for page layouting, QuarkCopyDesk for editing, copyfitting and reviewing text and Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word etc. for content editing.

Some key benefits of QPS Classic include:

• Manage, control, and track all the files in your system
• Streamline, track, and define demanding, collaborative workflows
• Archive, delete, transfer, assign, and track files, projects, and assignments
• Enable true simultaneous collaboration with QuarkXPress users
• See exactly how text displays within a read-only rendition of a layout or Web page
• Work from anywhere using industry-standard applications and file formats
• Keep software license and administrative costs in step with the peaks and valleys of business

Core modules included in QPS Classic

• QuarkDispatch
• QuarkDispatch Administrator
• QuarkDispatch Manager
• QuarkDispatch XTensions module
• QuarkCopyDesk
• QuarkConnect
• Quark License Administrator (QLA)

[edit] History

• QPS 1.0 (1991): Support for QuarkXPress 3.1
• QPS 1.1 (1996): Support for QuarkXPress 3.3
• QPS 2.0 (1998): Support for QuarkXPress 4
• QPS 2.2 (2003): Support for QuarkXPress 5, first version to use TCP/IP as a communication method
• QPS 3.0 (2004): Support for QuarkXPress 6, runs on MacOS X Server
• QPS 3.5 (2005): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger as well as Panther
• QPS 3.5.2 (2005): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger as well as Panther
• QPS 3.5.5 (2006): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger
• QPS 3.5.6 (2006): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger
• QPS 3.5.7 (2006): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger
• QPS 3.5.8 (2006): Support for QuarkXPress 6.5, runs on Mac OS X Tiger

[edit] See also

• QuarkXPress