Quark charm offensive to get closer to customers

The once notoriously hard-nosed company has embarked on a series of actions to try to improve its relationships with customers. Changed policies and pricing, new partners, and substantial resources in customer outreach programmes may provide a better deal for its long-suffering user base.

“From the inside out, we’re reassessing the way we do business and the quality and effectiveness of the solutions we develop to help our customers,” said Kamar Aulakh, who was appointed president and ceo in January. “As CEO, my biggest challenge has been to implement core changes that transform the way we do business so that we are closer to our customers. We have made fundamental changes to improve our company and our solutions, and we’re only going to get better.”

The latest upgrade, Quark 6.5, is expected to be released in Australia and New Zealand before Christmas, but no definite date is available. (Some things never change.) A new version QuarkXPress 7.0, which will address the image manipulation advantages of CS, is expected to be launched next year.

According to Daevid Richards, of Modulo Systems, the Australian Quark distributor
www.modulosystems.com.au the new version will use caching of images to preserve the original while it is being worked on. “It’s actually quite smart and I think it will be very useful, especially to large organizations with sizeable image banks,” he said.

Based on customer feedback, Quark recently revised its software-licensing policy for single-user licenses of QuarkXPress. Under the new policy, QuarkXPress 6 users can install and activate their software on a second computer at no additional charge. Activation on a second computer is simple and quick.

Quark has also released of Quark Publishing System 3 Classic Edition (QPS Classic 3), for professional publishing and editorial workflows. QPS Classic 3 provides full support for QuarkXPress 6 and Mac OS X, along with other performance enhancements. Used by more than 50,000 people at publishing sites worldwide, QPS Classic is one of the leading publishing systems in the industry.