Team
2022 in Review: Conscious Growth & Connection
Standing at the end of a successful year, we at Livingdocs would like to take the time to reflect on all that we have accomplished. Over our history, our core values of transparency, innovation and co-creation have served as the roots that give life to Livingdocs; they shape our growth as we develop our product, solidify our network and expand our team.
While 2021 saw Livingdocs branching out in different directions with new ideas and customers, we saw 2022 as a year of trimming and pruning to channel our focus more effectively. Moreover, through internal reorganisation and balanced growth, we have made sure to fertilise the soil with the right people, keeping our roots strong and robust to best support the evolution of our product. We believe it is this conscious approach to our company’s growth which allows us to gain momentum for success without losing the ability to remain responsive and flexible.
From customer wins to exciting events to the expansion of our team, join us as we revisit the highlights from this productive – and fun! – year.
Live from Berlin: Livingdocs Summit 2022
All smiles! Livingdocs Founders Lukas Peyer and Gabriel Hase.
We were thrilled to continue our Summit series this year in Berlin alongside our customer and co-host Ströer. With a curated program of compelling and even provocative speeches – as well as an informative and inspiring use case panel demonstrating what Livingdocs looks like in action – we were grateful to offer our customers and partners a chance to connect with us and each other face to face in a beautiful venue overlooking the Spree. During the program, we also presented our Vision and Roadmap for the year to come. Check out the impressions from this well-received event.
Impressions
Livingdocs Summit 2022 in Berlin
Want to dive deeper? You can stream the video recordings of the speeches and use case panel here.
Co-Creation in Action: New Customers and Stronger Partnerships
As we shared in our Vision and Roadmap for the year ahead, we believe our success is built on a foundation of transparent co-creation and collaboration with our trusted customers. It is thanks to our customers' key positioning in the news publishing world that we have been able to gain indispensable industry know-how. We allow these relationships to guide us as we refine our product so it has real relevance, addressing actual issues editorial teams encounter while providing more value for both the user experience and the reader experience.
Speaking of customers, we are delighted to say that we have taken on several new customers, namely der Standard, Handelsblatt Gruppe, and the Swiss Federal Administration, as well as Schwäbisch Media through our partnership with Netcetera. SZ and Ströer Media Brands – customers we gained at the close of last year – have also been central to this year’s activity. Learn more about what we have done for t-online (Ströer) in our success story.
When it comes to partners, we see our network of partners as an asset which allows us to best serve the needs of our customers. For example, one of the offerings our customers now have access to via our trusted partner network is the Appsfactory & Microsoft Azure Bundle.
Out and About: Livingdocs on the Road
After many months of working remotely with little to no human interaction, we were excited to get back out into the world to nurture our valued relationships with our customers and partners face to face in Würzburg, Nuremberg, Köln, Münich, Vienna, London and Berlin.
Visiting our partner Jambit in Münich...
...as well as our customer SZ...
...and in Nürnberg with our customer Kicker.
Our CEO Gabriel Hase was also a speaker at Forward Publishing’s event in Berlin. We were happy to take part in this kickoff event from this partnership initiative between Livingdocs and Netcetera, and share our thoughts on how technology can shape the trajectory of journalism.
We also made time for team bonding during our retreat in Münich. After visiting SZ to get an up-close-and-personal look into the workings of their newsroom, we made sure to make some fun memories with our dear colleagues.
Fruits of Our Labour: Product Evolution
This year, the Livingdocs product evolution was focused in 3 main branches: Collaboration and Editing, Workflows and Page and Teaser Management.
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Collaboration and Editing
Focal Point Cropping: Users can now set a focal point for a particular image and allow the automatic cropping capability to adjust for different aspect ratios while keeping the designated focus in the centre of the frame. With this feature, you can ensure you give your readers the images you want, without inadvertently cutting out the focal point.
Document Lists: Document Lists are used to collaboratively manage the teasers shown on different sections of pages. After last year's introduction of the Multilist-Editor, we have now enhanced the experience by allowing for multiple users to work on the same lists simultaneously, synchronising the changes to ensure everyone sees the same thing at all times.
Retresco: We integrated the Retresco tagging system to automatically add tags to a document with an intuitive UI. This integration is similar to the one we’ve done before with the iMatrics auto-tagging system. Automated adding of tags (via Retresco) to a Livingdocs document with the ability to edit the tags via Editor is now a supported functionality.
Standardised oEmbed Includes: Livingdocs provides a standardised way to embed elements from many different providers, from Facebook to Youtube. The ever-growing list of providers can be accommodated through a small piece of configuration.
Video Includes: By supporting Videos as includes, previewing a Video in the Livingdocs Editor with your own player is now possible. -
Workflows
Table Dashboards: With this new type of dashboard, you can experience greater flexibility in presenting all the different content within Livingdocs to different user-groups in Livingdocs. Simply place your different dashboards in groups in the Main Navigation to display exactly the data you need to see within a dashboard. By enabling direct editing of certain metadata fields on the dashboards, managing workflows with metadata and filters is now markedly more straightforward.
Publish Control: With 'Publish Control' we introduced a new publishing flow. It combines and standardises all things around publishing, scheduling publications and distribution features like lists and inboxes, and consolidates them in a central place. Managing embargos, significant updates and the publication date shown to your readers is now possible in a streamlined UI.
Document Creation Flows: Thanks to flexibly configurable Document Creation Flows, it is now much easier to define complex document creation scenarios. One example is the «Digitale Ausgabe» done for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, where users can create the roughly twenty pages of one issue and link them together into one product with the click of a button.
Metadata Form Improvements: A couple of improvements were implemented to improve the user experience on the Metadata Form. A sub-navigation allows users to jump to specific sections on the form and see the status of required metadata more clearly. When inserting text, the user can be guided by defining recommended minimum and maximum lengths which are shown in the UI. -
Page and Teaser Management
Drag & Drop of Article Teasers: Livingdocs now provides an Article Search directly in the Page Management Interface; placing article teasers is as simple as dragging and dropping them into position.
Desk-Net Integration: Our Integration with Desk-Net is now on a whole new level. By linking Livingdocs pages to specific Desk-Net platforms or categories, you can see your Desk-Net planning for a given day directly in Livingdocs; placing the teasers is done by dragging and dropping the Desk-Net planning entries onto the page.
Digital Edition (Digitale Ausgabe): To solve the case of producing the 'Digital Ausgabe' – or Digital Edition – for Süddeutsche Zeitung through Livingdocs, a new Metadata Plugin to manage all the pages and the teasers on them from within Livingdocs was introduced. Together with the new possibility of handling different asynchronous processes to bundle and distribute the «Digitalausgabe» with certainty, editors at the Süddeutsche Zeitung can produce and deliver this finite digitale product with ease.
Rising Up: Livingdocs and Kress Pro
One of our greatest achievements this year was our Kress Pro Ranking. We were awarded 2nd place in the Kress Pro Ranking 2022 of the best online content management systems in the German-speaking market. To come up with this year’s ranking, Kress Pro assessed the top 100 offerings in three areas within the GSA publishing market: newspaper, digital and magazine. Editorial and content management systems were ranked according to the sales figures of and visits to the publications where they are in use.
With the online publications using Livingdocs receiving 688.6 million visits in the past year, we are extremely proud of the impact we are making in the digital media space, having risen from 9th place to 2nd place in Kress Pro’s annual ranking in only four years.
Nourishing Our Roots: The People Behind Livingdocs
As our company grows, so does our team. We are happy to have welcomed new members to the Livingdocs family in 2022: Lorenzo, Dominik, Ives, Jordi and Sarah. We also saw internal reorganisation, namely Beni Buess being named Chief Product Officer (CPO). Above all else, it is the supportive teamwork and genuine affinity we have for one another that gives our roots the nutrients they need to sustain our growth.
We would like to end this reflection with an expression of gratitude for all that we have experienced this year, from the wins that we celebrated to the challenges that helped us learn and grow. The strongest trees in the forest can weather even the harshest of storms, and we are confident that our robust roots and measured method of growth will allow us to stand tall, remain resilient and thrive in the year to come. We look forward to exploring the growth potential that 2023 will bring.