Livingdocs Vision & Roadmap 22/23: How Implementation Partnerships Serve as Our Moving Mileposts

We want to make clear that the Livingdocs vision for the future is a living vision, one that will continue to adapt in line with the ever-evolving landscape of news publishing in the digital arena. In this way, we have come to realise that the idea of a rigid ‘Roadmap’ with set destination points does not reflect the way that we best serve our customers and partners. It is with this open approach that we create the opportunity for true innovation.

Therefore, when we share our Livingdocs vision for the future, we intend to spark an open and honest conversation about where we are going and how we can best respond to the needs of our customers and partners on that journey. We want to get your wheels turning, so we can smoothly cruise into the future together.

Implementation partnerships are key here. So how do they work? When developing new features and capabilities, we listen to the editorial requirements articulated directly by our customers, and we work together as a team, and in concert with our partners, to provide an implementation proposal that suits these needs.

Our Product Managers regularly meet with clients and partners to evaluate how we can help our customers achieve their goals faster and with less effort. We ask questions to truly understand our customers’ cases, and we explore which of our partnerships can be best leveraged to fit the needs articulated. We work closely with the relevant partner to give full shape to the concept, continuing to refine it until all parties are on board. We then present the partner with a feature proposal, partnership offer and timeline, which if agreed upon, initiates the process of implementing and integrating said features with a customer within the defined framework. The work is ongoing, and we work together to continually refine and improve the feature. The journey is collaborative from start to finish.

With each Livingdocs release, the features we develop are often a result of implementation partnerships.

For example, in partnership with our customer t-online, we implemented and integrated the Retresco plugin, an external service for text analysis and tag creation. We also created flexible parameters for defining metadata and optimised internal processes for t-online’s Media Library. As a result, publication workflows have been markedly accelerated.

In collaboration with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, we are currently developing the capabilities and features related to finite digital product management, as well as integration with our partner Desk-Net.

Back home in Switzerland, we are working with the Swiss government administration to offer multi-language translation UI capability on their platform, along with metadata translation for the media library and data records. We are also working with NZZ on creating a planning system for news publishers, a new frontier for Livingdocs. For more information on the features we are developing, please visit our Release Notes portal.

We would like to reiterate that we are a company driven by our values. We differentiate ourselves not only with our commitment to being a positive support to our customers and partners, but also by the principles that guide us, as defined in our mission statement below:

We are also invested in honouring our connections face-to-face in this increasingly digital world. In an effort to demonstrate this commitment with our valued network, Livingdocs held its Summit in Berlin, co-hosted by our partner Ströer and customer t-online. Check out the impressions from this great event. Want to watch the recording of our 2022/23 Vision and Roadmap presentation by our CEO Gabriel Hase and CPO Beni Buess from the Summit? Click on the video below.

If anything in these past years have taught us anything, it’s that the future is uncertain. And we are committed to being flexible, ever adapting to our customers needs and the landscape in which we operate. Let’s make publishing easier than ever – together!