Mekon turns 20 this year!
For two decades our team has been evolving and diversifying to cover a variety of content-related technologies and applications. Looking back, we're happy to have the market we've worked so hard in recognise our skills with regular invitations to share knowledge in educational articles, and as featured speakers at major industry events on Content Management, DITA, S1000D, XQuery and related themes.
Mekon's Achilles heel has always been communicating all the different things we actually do - even to customers who know us well. Over the years, while establishing ourselves as leading UK vendor-independent consultants and systems integrators, we've been 'the FrameMaker people', 'the Aerospace-Defence people', 'the XML people', 'the Training people', and a variety of other nicknames or product-affiliations which fail to capture the spectrum of services we offer, or our commitment to provide our customers the best technology options for them, with vendor bias.
Oh, How You've Changed
Since 2000 and beyond Mekon has moved into new areas becoming a contributing member of the international XML community evangelising, training and implementing XML solutions on various open-source and commercial platforms. These solutions have been taken up across industries including engineering, aerospace and defence, government, publishing and technology and manufacturing.
Newly implemented projects include American Express, Aston Martin, Micro Focus, Martin Baker, COI, BMJ, and Panasonic, who all partnered with Mekon because they recognised the benefits Mekon can bring to their organisation especially during the economic downturn. We're also pleased to see clients including GSK and the Civil Aviation Authority have remained repeat customers now for over a decade each.
Communicating Differently
Until very recently, Mekon has spent focussed so much on projects, clients and keeping on top of the latest technologies, we've had little time left to communicate our successes and lessons learned to the market at large. To counter this, recently Mekon have:
- relaunched a restyled and revamped Mekon.com
- started this bi-monthly newsletter and our blog
- developed and established X-Pubs, its website and ongoing on and offline events calendar to bring together global thought leaders and the community
- and recruited PR Company Parker Wayne and Kent to share our project experiences and news
20 Things You Didn't Know About Mekon
As a bit of fun we will be sharing 20 things which you might not know about Mekon in this year’s newsletters. To start us off, here's 20 projects of interest:
- Actis - Dynamic PDF forms-based process automation solution
- American Express - Dynamic PDF forms-based process automation solution
- Aston Martin - Component Content Management System (Ovidius CCMS) consultancy and implementation
- Boeing - supplied Eclipse Bookbuild and Eclipse Create S1000D (Mekon packaged solutions)
- CaSE Insurance - eForms implementation streamlines processes
- Civil Aviation Authority - 10 years of ongoing service
- Elekta Medical Devices - Component Content Management (CCM) strategy, planning, and tool selection consultancy
- ENVC Dockyard - S1000D Systems integration and implementation (Corena Life*)
- Eurocontrol - Europe-wide single sourcing XML project
- International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) -Template Development (FrameMaker)
- Key Note - XML for the non-Tech Author (Mark Logic, Quark XML Author)
- Legal and General - eForms implementation (LiveCycle Designer)
- Oxford University Press - Journal publishing implementation (FrameMaker)
- Schlumberger - DITA documentation implementation (XMetaL, MathFlow, AntennaHouse)
- Travelers - XSLT publishing development
- Parliamentary Councel - Authoring bills and acts using FrameMaker
- Pearson (Edexcel) - online review saves hundreds of thousands of £/year
- STMicroelectronics - Kicking off a DITA project for multi-million euro savings
- Symbian - Docato CCMS implementation
- UK Parliament (Hansard) - highly automated XMetaL, XPP-based publishing solution
