VeeDeePee: get up close and personal with variable-data publishing (vdp)

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GMC at drupa

Following GMC's recent announcement of an "Integrated Marketing System", I decided to stop by their drupa stand to find out more on their latest offering and get up to speed with their PrintNet solution.

PrintNet T Designer is GMC's core offering. It's a document design and production solution for high-volume applications. I was pleasantly surprised how usable the software is and it's logical architecture, as similar VDP solutions for transactional applications offer a limited design environment and require a certain level of programming skills.

PrintNet T Designer enables users to build a complete production workflow, from data input to print output. The interface features an intuitive interface where you can drag nodes from a panel and drop them into a workspace, then connect them to other nodes. PrintNet's workflow is based on four discrete stages; data input, data manipulation, impostion and output.

Building a workflow in PrintNet T Designer

PrintNet offers a host of various data input options, from a data file (or files), scripts, XML, ODBC connector, SAP connector along with several other options. Once the data input sources are defined, you can then add data manipulation nodes (or tasks).

'Data manipulation' components are essentially data processing tasks which are applied to the raw data file prior to composition. These include record filtering, text replacement, merging data sources, creating relationships between data sources, through to statistical data profiling tools. Like all nodes in PrintNet, you drag-and-drop the required nodes from into the workspace and connect them to other nodes.

The next step is to create your document template. Again, a template is presented as a node in Designer and can be created and directly within Designer. The page/form design environment is proprietary, unlike other solutions which plug-in to InDesign or QuarkXPress. Having said that, it's a very impressive and full-featured design environment featuring advanced page layout tools souch as text-on-a-path, bezier tool, fill styles, border styles and more. The page layout environment can also use plug-in tools such as DirectType for image personalisation and offers control over object formatting, including fill styles and border styles. This toolset and flexibility reaches beyond most proprietary page layout environments that I have seen in the past.

Creating a document template in PrintNet T Designer

As you'd expect, you can preview the records while designing the template, but PrintNet also features two very unique and impressive features; the ability to validate the template before composition (for errors such as copy overflow, missing assets, etc) and report the composition speed in pages per minute, before composition.

The next stage in the PrintNet workflow is imposition. PrintNet offers a number of imposition configurations for VDP templates, including sheet filtering, n-up, booklet maker (nice!) and OMR capabilities (e.g. barcode numbering on pages). The final stage in the workflow is to define output nodes, which can be a data file, report, and/or print file.

Production is triggered from a separate production environment, which can be installed as a client application in the production environment (e.g. on the print controller). From this, you can define which workflow you would like to process (a 'workflow' includes the data, design and imposition details for the VDP job) and also specify which output format you would like. PrintNet offers every supported VI format that I can think of, including VPS, PPML, IPDS, IJPDS and many others.

GMC's recent product announcements, GMC PortalBuilder and GMC Open Document Publisher (ODP) futher extend the capabilities of PrintNet. PortalBuilder is essentially a web-to-print solution, similar in concept to XMPie uStore. It enables rapid deployment of a web-to-print marketing portal, without programming, in around 30 minutes. An administrator can add PrintNet templates into the portal and deploy them to an online portal, for browser-based customisation and ordering through a shopping-cart type experience.

Open Document Publisher (ODP) is a solution for record optimisation. It provides an automated process to collect, sort, merge and dispatch VDP templates according to defined business rules. Essentially, it lets you build a sorting criteria for creating a consolidated, sorted print file for postal lodging optimisation. GMC weren't showing ODP on their stand, so I didn't really have an opportunity to evaluate it properly, but it seems fairly logical to have the flexibility to sort records at composition time, rather than during the data preparation phase.

In summary, GMC's solution is intuitive, logical and powerful. it appears that GMC are broadening their solution capabilities to meet today's market direction and customer demands, which other VDP software vendors will also need to consider if they want to keep up in this rapidly-changing and dynamic market.

Posted on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 at 3:00 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/147