Team
2023 in Review: Go-Lives, Livestreams and a Lot More
What a massive year! Taking the time to channel our focus more effectively through 2022 certainly paid off; from go-lives to livestreams, Livingdocs has been riding a powerful wave all throughout 2023.
Now as we approach the end of year pause, we are taking a breath and some time to reflect on all the highlights of the past several months, so we can appreciate our collective growth and get inspired for the year to come.
Customers: Cruising through a String of Green Lights
Let’s start with a bang: Go-lives. We have seen quite a few this year. Our trusty team has been busy, indeed!
Several of our customers saw successful rollouts of Livingdocs as their new CMS in 2023, starting with Süddeutsche Zeitung. Further go-lives include a massive tech overhaul over 8 projects in less than a year at Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and a full migration of 250 editors in 4 days at DER STANDARD. Later in the year, Düsseldorf-based Handelsblatt also went live enthusiastically with Livingdocs.
Standing customers also saw several Livingdocs rollouts in their overarching programs. Seven.One Entertainment Group had several sites go live with Livingdocs: Newstime, ran.de, and Austrian sites ProSieben, Kabeleins, Sixx and Sat 1.
Ströer Media Brands, our partner in last year’s Livingdocs Summit, also saw Livingdocs go-lives under their umbrella of products, including familie.de and desired. Moveover, t-online was featured in Press Gazette discussing their business model and how Livingdocs supports that.
In addition, Aschendorff and Schwäbish Media also went live with Livngdocs through Forward Publishing, our partnership initiative with netcetera.
Partners: Creating Consistency and Strengthening Bonds
Speaking of partners, we are always keen to ensure we align with partnerships that enable us to provide the best possible experience for our customers when they introduce Livingdocs, and our partners play a key role in making these success stories happen.
For example, Centralsoft has been a critical partner in several successful Livingdocs rollouts, most recently in the comprehensive project constellation at Seven.One Entertainment Group.
When it came to DER STANDARD, Appsfactory played a key role in ensuring that the Livingdocs rollout took place in record time.
Our partner Jambit also played a role in supporting several big projects, including the ones at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger and Handelsblatt.
In alignment with our aim to explore the possibility of regional expansion, we also entered into a new partnership with global tech company intive.
As we expand our network, we seek to find ways to bring everyone together (and, ideally, to have fun!). For us, we love to do this through events.
In lieu of a Livingdocs Summit this year, we decided to host in-house events instead. Our Spotlight livestream hybrid events took a more intimate approach as we invited a selection of guests to our office for an afternoon of talks from featured customers. In April, we welcomed Süddeutsche Zeitung to share their experience working with Livingdocs in the context of page management and their premium finite product, the Digitale Ausgabe. In November, we hosted another Spotlight highlighting go-lives and rollouts featuring speakers from DER STANDARD and Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
Our CEO Gabriel Hase speaking at our kick-off Spotlight event with Süddeutsche Zeitung
Outside of our own events, we also were present at engaging industry events as we expand our network into more regions. Our Head of Business, Céline Tykve, was front and centre during these occasions, and shared her takeaways and insights on the hottest topics and trends in today’s world of digital news publishing.
Product: Ever Adapting for Actual Needs
As we continue to observe the news publishing industry’s needs as it evolves in the digital era, we continue to shape our product in order to best support our customers and address their actual needs. Indeed, we aim to build the best product possible.
For example, with the increasing popularity of live blogging and ticker feeds, we incorporated a Ticker tool in the September 2023 Release.
We also enhanced the Livingdocs UI so it is now available in different languages – German, English, Italian and French – in order to match and accommodate a newsroom’s language needs and preferences, whether a newsroom wants to choose a single language or implement a multi-language setup as in the case of the Schweizer Bundesverwaltung (Swiss Federal Administration) .
Moreover, given our commitment to facilitating newsroom workflows, we continuously seek to improve how we do just that. We have improved workflow support capabilities with improvements to table dashboards with editable cells and home screen, enhanced search filters, Issue Management and more, leading to a significant and long-term-valuable improvement of our product.
Outlook: Moving into the Future with a Forward-Thinking Perspective
From every angle, we at Livingdocs have had a busy year, and have experienced bustling activity and growth. In alignment with this expansive momentum, we are thrilled to say we have added three new members to the Livingocs Team: Tanja, Sharon and Thomas.
The Livingdocs Team at the Q4 2023 Quarterly Meeting
In order to accommodate our growing team, we have embarked on an ongoing office upgrade project to create more space, beautify the environment and enhance the working environment. We even added new artwork courtesy of our customers to add some life to the walls.
Office Upgrade
New Artwork
In terms of where we see our journey taking us next, we will continue to keep our finger on the pulse of this rapidly changing digital media landscape.
We recently compiled our observations and released a white paper called Making Change Easy: How to Tackle the Key Challenges of Digital Transformation in News Publishing. For example, one of the challenges we see news publishers face is keeping up with the pace of technological advancement, such as responding to the increasing presence of artificial intelligence, GenAI in particular. In response, we are looking to implement GenAI in a proven, value-adding use case. Stay tuned for an update on our roadmap in the new year!
We would like to conclude this year in review with a sincere gratitude for the journey that was 2023. We look forward to continuing to growth and evolve in 2024 (and beyond).