team
2024 in Review: Community Building, Strategy Shaping and more
Here we are again, looking back on another great year of positive momentum and conscious growth. As they say, time flies when you’re having fun, and we have held true to our ethos – we’re friendly and fun, and we get our work done – while achieving our goals and setting new ones.
Community was a key theme in 2024, with our Summit serving as a climactic point of coming together, as well as the recalibrating of our approach to product development and delivery. In the spirit of continuous learning and reflective engagement, we are taking the time to look back on what we have experienced in order to appreciate what we have accomplished as a team, and to gain learnings so we can be best guided moving forward.
Customers: Staying close as we succeed together
Customers are key members of our community, and the key to our success. It is through their feedback and collaboration that we are able to define and shape our product for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Seeing our customers transform their newsroom workflows for the better makes our work worthwhile, and we are always happy to celebrate and spread the word of our joint success.
The year kicked off with a massive rollout success: 20 Minuten, plus 4 sister brands under the TX Group umbrella – 20 minutes, L'essentiel (FR), L'essentiel (DE) and Le Matin – all went live with Livingdocs in our Managed Service model.
Later in the year, we announced the go-live of Ulm-based Neue Presse Gesellschaft (NPG) and all three of its brands: Südwest Presse, Markischen Oderzeitung and Lausitzer Rundschau.
Long-standing customer Ströer Media Brands also saw the go-live of one of its brands, Giga, as part of the ongoing consolidation of their portfolio onto the Livingdocs CMS
Completing the regional alignment of Seven.One Entertainment Group’s brand sites, the Swiss websites of sixx, kabeleins, Sat1 and ProSieben were relaunched on Livingdocs with the support of our partner Centralsoft.
Partners: Joining forces to reach goals
Talking about partners, over the years, our strong network of partners have helped our shared customers reach their goals while fostering a mutual exchange of know-how. We are grateful for the work we were able to accomplish with our integration partners: Centralsoft, a&f, Appsfactory, jambit, netcetera and unitB.
We highlighted our partnership with Retresco, which played a role in the go-live at NPG, was also highlighted in a joint press release from this past spring.
We also highlighted the product partners in our ecosystem. For example, we have long worked alongside Kordiam in several customer cases in which their system for planning content production and distribution was in place, wherein our capabilities for creating and managing content were a welcome complement.
Livingdocs Summit 2024: Bringing the community together
Indeed, our community of customers and partners has been built and nurtured over years of transparent communication and fruitful collaboration. In an effort to gather all the members of our community together under one roof, we host a Summit every other year so we can enjoy each other’s company face to face, strengthening our bonds over learnings and libations.
This year we held the Livingdocs Summit in Munich at the Süddeutsche Zeitung high rise, welcoming about 100 guests. Over two days, we not only offered an inspiring presentation program from hand-picked speakers and industry experts, but we also shared our plans for our product moving forward.
Product: The dawn of a new era
When it comes to the Livingdocs product, one thing is certain: it will never be stagnant. We are continually shaping it in the interest of versatility, effectiveness and future-readiness. As such, we want to expand our product’s capabilities while streamlining its structure by offering a new approach: individual configuration of standardised components with as little extra code as possible. This approach will support the perfect blend of individualisation and standardisation so customers can leverage the best of Livingdocs to suit their specific needs seamlessly and right out of the box.
One of the areas where users can already experience this shift towards standardisation with individual configuration is in page management. Livingdocs now covers more key page management use cases, such as publishing centralized content for multiple brands while still being able to place brand-specific articles, or handling/working with fixed-position articles within dynamic content sections.
This shift in approach coincides with our commitment to cover a broader range of workflows within Livingdocs, including topic and distribution planning, asset management, page creation and print preparation.
Our delivery model is also seeing a shift, as we are now offering Livingdocs in a Azure-hosted Managed Service model so customers can benefit from around-the-clock support and points of contact who bring a perfect blend of technical and customer service skills to provide assistance whether when setting up new features or troubleshooting.
Beyond the evolution of our product from a structure and delivery perspective, we are also always being sure to keep up with the technological advancements that the industry is seeing. For example, we laid out our approach to adopting AI tech in our product in an AI strategy paper from our CTO, Lukas Peyer.
Our bimonthly product releases also have reflected our drive to evolve intentionally and arrive at a leaner system with an even wide range of capabilities. We introduced Livingdocs Assistants so users could make use of a variety of GenAI services with material impact to support their best work via the Livingdocs Assistants platform; users can also now work with Livingdocs Assistants Proposals and Livingdocs Assistants for Metadata.
We also optimised document handling with Document Statistics for building new data-related entry points, and Document Inbox, Document Copy & Transform Flows and Document Info Panel for greater transparency and smoother delivery.
We also made improvements to key features and functionalities like Tickers, the Media Library, and Editable Components, and introduced new ones like Conditional Components and Print Copy.
Inside out: Broadening horizons and boosting visibility
As we continue to evolve as a product, we are growing as a company. We welcomed several new faces to the Livingdocs family throughout the year, including Martin Lüscher formerly of watson News, as well as 8 additional members to round out our Customer Solutions and Product teams.
To accommodate our growing team, we continued to work on our ongoing office renovations, taking over the whole floor and making upgrades to our kitchen and meeting spaces.
This internal expansion reflects our bolder positioning in the international news media community. The Livingdocs brand got some great kudos thanks to the Audiencers, which included Livingdocs as one of the best 4 CMSes for modern news publishers.
We also wanted to get our brand out there on a more proactive level. At the start of the year, we joined the International News Media Association (INMA) as part of our aim to open the door to even wider possibilities for impact.
To boost our brand visibility, we made contributions to INMA’s Digital Strategies blog about the importance of intuitive UX and user centricity in a CMS, how a lean product structure allows for easier, more sustainable innovation and what key tactics help news publishers have a successful CMS rollout. We also attended the INMA World Congress in London in the spring where we met and connected with familiar faces and new ones alike, and are already exploring which INMA events we will attend in 2025.
And just last week, we announced with great excitement that Livingdocs has been included in the updated CMS Vendor Selection Tool, an initiative driven by INMA and the Google News Initiative. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to showcase our work with even greater visibility in the international community.
Outlook: Embracing the nonlinear
In product development, as in life, everything comes in cycles. In this regard, we are ever grateful to have a team that is able to circle around to honestly reassess and determine what must be let go of and what must be nurtured so we can forge ahead and offer our customers the best of Livingdocs. This conscious approach and commitment to our vision has empowered us to keep up the positive momentum year after year as we expand our presence and our community. We look forward to continuing to enable newsroom transformation for major players in the news media industry in 2025 and beyond!
