PrintFace Web2Print Server

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PrintFace Web2Print Server 2011

Now in its eighth year of development and reaching version 5 in releases, the PrintFace Web2Print Server 2011 is a uniquely innovative means to creating web2print solutions for enterprise organisations.

PrintFace Web2Print Server is a powerful e-business application delivering highly versatile, personalised marketing using the latest digital press and publishing technologies. The system uses a unique personalisation and customisation approach to generate content automatically based on user profiling, variable data and dynamically generated design templates. The result is personalised marketing at a corporate, end user and customer level, incorporating the secure deployment of corporate branding, and outputting a rich variety of single or combined marketing ‘products’.

Output. The PrintFace system produces personalized print, eprint and ‘component’ content for use in new media through combining a variety of data sources and templates. The system has been proven in a wide range of blue chip corporate accounts over the last eight years, and was approved by Hewlett-Packard in 2005 for use with HP Indigo digital presses and remains one of only a handful of Digital Press Solution Partner systems approved by HP on the market today.

Consulting & Implementation. As a solution platform, PrintFace requires a small amount of technical implementation time to be deployed in its basic form. The system is, however, usually customised to the specific requirements of the client in order to maximise its potential to resolve clearly identified business problems and/or create competitive advantage. The PrintFace team focus on delivering a clearly defined return on investment. To achieve this, our approach is to focus on business benefits and the seamless integration of the system within an organisation’s operations. To this end, there is a strong business consultancy element to any PrintFace implementation engagement.

Versatility & Automation. A key goal of the system has been to reduce or eliminate communications latency (the time needed to go from 'design concept to production' on any given marketing item). These delays are introduced where several disciplines collaborate in sequence. They are often inappropriate for modern day competitive business activity where time is of the essence and the tools already exist within the enterprise to deliver marketing communications automatically. Increasingly the need to react or maximise an advantage before the competition requires streamlining the delivery of short-lived, time critical communications to the field. Our focus on the user profile has played a key role in achieving this streamlining as we are able to ‘pre-personalise’ items ready to be consumed rather than wait for user intervention.

Data Integration. The latest version (5.0) of the system has been further enhanced in order to generate personalised materials utilising corporate data feeds and readily accessible information from popular social network sites - meeting the demands of 21st century opportunities and the emerging requirements of mixed media marketing communications*.

These specific features and our overall approach combine to create a uniquely rich and powerful set of business focused capabilities.

Document Design - Our powerful, web-based design environment takes over where Adobe's Creative Suite leaves off, utilising these industry standard applications to transform high resolution PDFs into the basis of new e-doc platforms featuring imposed variable fields, data sources and image libraries. Publishing instantly adds these e-docs to the catalogue ready and available to users. Information held within the user profile can be used at a corporate level ‘upstream’ for enterprise level campaigns powered with localised data.
Advanced Profiling - Substantially enhanced profiles that use personal data, plus information on contacts and customers input manually or drawn from popular office applications, social networks and enterprise data feeds, in order to drive corporate marketing materials in exciting new ways, generating powerful marketing communication’s content for use in a wide range of potential situations.
Intelligent Templates - Using the system's unique content managed production engine, the templates themselves can be data driven backgrounds for personalised or variable content, and can be used to automatically generate further artwork components for use within more templates (such as logos), thereby creating a new and infinite range of design possibilities.
Multimedia Marketing - Meeting the demand for a truly integrated approach to marketing, from print to Flash presentations to web sites and mobile, the system outputs 'packages' of linked new media marketing items designed to support coherent, collaborative multichannel communication campaigns and allowing you access to pre-generated packages of marketing materials designed to work together and linked through personalisation throughout.

Main Enhancements:

User Data – Contacts. Users can add not just their own details but their contacts details for use within the templates
Corporate Data – Web Service Support. The system now includes the support for accessing corporate date via a web service generation tool. Now enterprise data sources can be included as well as user profile date in the templates, enabling the templates to deliver marketing and other materials with far greater reach.

PrintFace Web2Print Server Version 5 [2011 edition] further offers:

Data profile driven business focused approach greatly reduces the need for users to interact manually with templates in the ordering of marketing materials
Profile includes personal and 'contact' (categorised as customer or prospect, or in customer defined categories) information as standard for primary personalisation of marketing
New data integration with live feed, import and export capability using commonly defined standards such as the popular VCard
Profile data capture 'designer and developer' tool offers infinite depth to extending the primary personalisation information pool
Users can be allocated with a budget, centrally managed and updated based on email alerts from the system when limits reached
User orders can be approved centrally for printing with artwork available for viewing by marketing management
Web based template creation tool makes the online development, editing and management of template content available anywhere there is a secure Internet connection
Imports vector based Adobe PDF artwork and generates all component low resolution, thumbnail, medium resolution and high resolution, CMYK/RGB imagery
Page bleed (3mm) support as standard
CMYK spot colour support
Background imagery can be saved as the basis of a new template with data fields intact making variant templates based on a common design quick and easy to create
Template categories created from within the template design tool making rapid deployment to live quick and easy
Outputs all necessary files including low, medium and high resolution artwork in a variety of formats, singly and as packages or groups of materials, for use on screen or in print ready form
Active templates generate personalised materials automatically, using a second tier data integration engine in order to create component artwork for use elsewhere in the system with corporate 'background' data
Simple, integral, catalogue based preview and ordering process
Featuring user 'in situ' WYSIWYG typing and image imposition
Templates feature a wide range of text field types including fixed length, variable length, alphanumeric, numerical, text only, scalable text, within paragraph, multiple choice drop down, and on an angle text
Image management, uploading and imposition within templates including image transparency
Manages end to end ordering and print processes including credit card payment
Orders generated and approved centrally for printing are released to print with an appropriately personalised email being sent to the printer automatically
Orders generated for print have an order PDF created and saved to an FTP folder for the printer automatically
The printer can access a console to acknowledge order dispatch with an email automatically generated and sent to the customer
Users can track the processing of their orders throughout
System has been integrated into the popular DotNetNuke CMS solution
Profile contact data marked and grouped for imposition and 'printing'
Advanced profiles including contact details creates new opportunity for user community print downstream
New standard template library pre-developed and ready to go with commonly used items included with GoogleDocs integration

Adobe business research states that nearly 70% of consumers ended a business relationship in 2009 through poor customer service, and 66% of these turned then to a competitor. The PrintFace Web2Print Server assists your business and your business partners or agents to reduce this cost to the organisation through consistent communications in the form of letters, welcome packs, brochures, proposals, policies, contracts and reports. Each of these help build the customer relationship and, especially in the intangible service sector, become a key means of delivering corporate messages of trust and reliability.