May 04, 2010

K4 Version 6 Article Components Can Now be Checked-Out by Multiple Users

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InCopy and InDesign users can accept individual story tasks from within a single InCopy article 

In previous versions of K4, an individual editorial user inside of InCopy could check out an article and edit the individual stories that were contained within the article they were working on. However, if another editor needed to edit part of the article, the editor would have to wait until the article was checked back in. This linear (take-turn) workflow was an issue for some publications because oftentimes, senior editorial staff would write headlines, while copy editors would edit the story itself. There could potentially be a separate editor for many of the different pieces of text that make up a story. You could have one editor that chooses pull-quotes, and another editor that writes captions for the images.

In K4 Version 5 you could have a workflow that linearly passes the story to each editor. But passing the story does take extra time. The feature needed with K4 was for editors to have the ability to work on tasks simultaneously. Or, you would need to make every single story its own article. When stories aren't packaged together as one article, naming can get confusing, and Editors need to quickly know which article contains the piece of the story they need to edit. Breaking the story into separate articles can also create XML Export issues later on in the workflow process. If you wanted the whole story exported together out of K4, all the pieces should be contained in one article. Depending on a publication's needs, both solutions work, but both do have their drawbacks.

It should also be noted that inside the basic InCopy and InDesign Live Edit workflow, InCopy users are allowed to check out separate parts of an assignment. This was a new feature added in CS2.

Now in K4 Version 6, you no longer need any workarounds because multiple editorial users can check out separate stories from within a single InCopy article! Let me show you a new workflow that is now possible inside K4 version 6.

Step 1: Editorial enters copy

In this first step, an Editor can enter the copy into an InCopy template. Even if the editor initiating the workflow for the story doesn't have a headline, caption, or pullquote, the area for that information is still available inside the InCopy template. Another person in editorial can update this information later on by completing a pre-defined task. To find out more about K4's new task-based workflow, read my blog at: http://www.databasepublish.com/blog/vjoons-k4-version-6-packed-tons-new-and-exciting-features.

This is an example of a properly built K4 article template.

Step 2: Design places edited story

Once a production person places the edited story into InDesign, they can place all the pieces of the story onto the page. Even if there is only "Dummy Copy" in place of the actual text, the individual story can still be placed. The advantage to placing the story before the correct editor writes the headline, caption, or pullquote, is that the InDesign user can format the dummy text so that the editor in InCopy will know exactly how much space they have to write inside of.

This is what an InDesign user will see when the story is placed into InDesign.

The designer in InDesign can also choose not to place the stories until they see that that part of the article has been updated.

Step 3: Specific editors are given the task of finishing their own part of the article

Individual editors who do specific tasks such as writing a headline, caption, or photo credits are automatically assigned their specific task, after the InDesign user checks the article back in. They are notified either from within an InCopy dialog box or by email that the new task is ready for them to complete. Even though it is one article within the K4 system, multiple users either within InDeign or InCopy can now check out pieces of the article individually.

In the K4 attachments panel, InCopy users can see who has which part of an article checked out. The red arrow indicates another user has that particular story already checked out.

After the correct editorial person updates each portion of the article, the InDesign user can simply update the individual parts of the article they have already placed. Or, they can place the stories as they see them updated inside the K4 Attachments panel.

Enabling multiple users to work within the same article is a giant milestone for vjoon. This feature alone can save hundreds of hours of production time, simply because the editors no longer have to wait "their turn" to edit their part of an article. This feature also allows editorial the ability to deliver the entire article, with all its respective pieces to the Web Department as one package that contains all the story pieces needed for the web. K4 users have spoken, and the developers at vjoon have listened. This is just one of the many new exciting features within K4 version 6.

Posted at 09:49 am by Robert Underwood

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