TEAM

2021 in Review: New Standards and Stronger Networks

Text: Céline Tykve, December 21, 2021

Another year is coming to an end. And who would have thought last year, that we would be in this very similar situation again this year? Probably only a very small percentage of people. After an extremely isolated and remote 2020, the team at Livingdocs was excited to share some more time together again this year. Apart from reconnecting with each other in the office, we counted a shared retreat on the Uetliberg to be one of our personal highlights. Let’s shed some light on our other highlights from 2021.

A New Event Series Was Born

One of our greatest highlights this year was certainly being able to organize and realize the first Livingdocs Summit. It was a pleasure to host this real-life event in Zurich, getting to know our partners and customers personally and enjoying some inspirational talks together. As the feedback was so incredibly positive, we have decided to turn this event format into a series that we will certainly keep alive in the coming years. For some impressions, check out our blogpost about the Summit.

During the Summit, we also presented the roadmap of our product for 2022, which you can check out here. For this article, we would like to have a look at the highlights of new features from this year.

Creation Experience

Among the biggest improvements around the experience using our editor and CMS as a journalist or writer, were the developments of new features in the following areas:

Media Library

- Video & Files: new types of files and videos can be uploaded, edited and translated in our media library
- Media Sources: external media sources and additional media libraries can now be handled through our media library
Multi Language / Translation Functionalities

- Translation Workflows: The existing document translation workflow can now also be used for data records & media assets
Notifications

- Email and Slack: One can now allow notifications to be sent via email or Slack for configurable events connected to the publishing process
Page Management

- Multilist Editor: one can now edit multiple lists referenced on a page at once
- Named Crops: the crop management has been greatly enhanced with named and predefined crops

Developer Experience

We also worked on improving the experience for developers working with Livingdocs. These are some of the highlights from this year.

Public API

The new Composition API is a more capable alternative to the /latestPublication endpoint.
Includes API

Preloading Support is now simpler to use and brings a big performance boost.
Elasticsearch

The new Multi Cluster Indexing uses lightning fast indexing for custom indexes or across multiple data-centers.
Performance

We improved our rendering speed (20x faster HTML rendering).
Media Library

One can now enable a custom Video Transcoding Integration to roll one’s own video service.
Sitemap and Feed Generation

The sitemap generation is now faster for millions of documents.

New Partners & Collaborators

Another very important change last year has been our increased effort in building up strong and long-time relationships with integration partners. With an ever more increased interest in Livingdocs and some new, big customers (Welcome, dear SZ!) we at Livingdocs are working with a growing network of partners to be able to realize even more digitization projects together. We are excited to have welcomed Appsfactory, Bitgrip, and unitb as new partners this year.

The Top 10 Publishing Systems for digital media in the German-speaking market.

Kress Pro 03/2021

With ever more customers taking advantage of the most powerful web editing solution available, we were also able to improve our rank in the annual “Kress Pro” Publishing Software ranking: Livingdocs now ranks among the top 3 publishing systems for digital media in the German-speaking market.

Team Work Makes The Dream Work

Despite the ongoing, limiting social situation due to Covid, our team has not only grown stronger together, but has also grown in numbers (Welcome Joe!). We have learned to improve our remote, digital collaboration even more and work on our internal structures. But we have also enjoyed countless hours together at smaller and larger team gatherings as well as at the office again. Btw, we have outgrown our current office in Zürich during the last year(s) and are currently looking for a new headquarter. Any hints are welcome!

We are very grateful for this successful year, which has allowed us to grow a new network of partners and welcome new customers into our Livingdocs universe. Let’s make the publishing world even more intuitive together!

P.S. Are you ready for something personal? We are sharing some of our home office situations with you - the view you are normally not seeing when in a call with our team ;) Enjoy!