Tips and Bits

Wanna Put a Branded Watermark on Your PDF Previews?

Howdy, my name is Petri Isola. I am the Consulting Services Manager here at Pageflex.

Many Pageflex Storefront customers would like to have the PDF previews on their site be watermarked. With a watermark you can offer a high-quality PDF preview while protecting the piece from being printed elsewhere. And better yet, the watermark should be customizable. For instance, it may display your logo or your customer’s brand.

With the help of a Pageflex-provided Document Action script it is easy to create branded watermarks to be used on the Pageflex Storefront deployments. When your end-users view a PDF preview, the customized document will include your watermark.

You have control over the look and content of the watermark, and you can easily share it across multiple deployments by putting the watermark image in a shared location.

I’ve placed the watermark document action script and detailed instructions in the Pageflex Support Knowledgebase. Search for Answer ID #416 under “Find Answers.”

Conversen Brings Variable Print to Their Digital Platform

Conversen’s customers are innovative marketers. And Conversen is an innovative company also. Conversen offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that lets marketers communicate with their consumers through a variety of digital channels, including email, Web, SMS, RSS, and social media. They have now added print to this mix by licensing Pageflex Server and integrating it into their platform. Traditionally, we work with companies that are experts in print communications and are expanding their efforts to support digital forms of communications. It is nice when we see the digital frontier acknowledge the importance that print, and especially VARIABLE print, still plays in marketing to consumers.

Paul Mandeville, Conversen’s COO, recently explained to me the market need that lead them to use Pageflex. “CMO surveys consistently show that integrating offline and online communications is a high priority, and this partnership with Bitstream to bring Pageflex digital print capabilities into a platform that already supports email, web, SMS, and social content is powerful.”

Paul went on to say that ““Marketing services companies and agencies will tell you that they spend more time being general contractors of multi-channel programs than they spend creating the program concepts and creative, and that’s an imbalance that needed fixing.  By integrating Pageflex into the Conversen platform, we’ve essentially untied the hands of marketers everywhere.”

Conversen uses business rules within their platform to drive the variable composition of Pageflex templates using both demographic and relational data sources, as well as Conversen’s built-in activity- and response-based logic. The result is a highly personalized, print-ready, digital asset that can be downloaded and printed locally, or sent to the client’s print vendor.

Conversen CEO Philip Chischportich calls it “an amazing efficiency play,” and says that “we’re already seeing clients save between 30%-50% on printing costs.” I’m looking forward to sharing some real-life case studies in the coming months!

New Feature: Multi-Level Approval Options for Document and Order Review in Pageflex Storefront

Hi, I’m Dave McCormack, a Business Development Manager at Pageflex. I work with a number of corporate customers that use Pageflex Storefront to manage the customization and ordering of sales and marketing documents. The new feature I’m most looking forward to sharing with these customers is the multi-level approval workflow in Pageflex Storefront.

 

Our team has built a really comprehensive set of functionality directly into Pageflex Storefront to manage complex order approval processes. The new functionality in Pageflex 7.5 goes well beyond the simple one-step approval process that many customers use in Pageflex Storefront today.

 

Multiple levels of approvals means that multiple stakeholders have a say on whether a Pageflex Storefront order is fulfilled. For example, a sales manager, a corporate lawyer, and a marketing director can all be required to review the order details or customization of a document created by a sales person. The order will not move to production until all three reviewing entities have approved it. This helps corporations design and implement procurement controls that are right for their business processes.

 

The whole approval process is set up with notifications and reminders to keep documents moving towards production. End users can see the status of any order they submitted that required approval. While Pageflex Storefront Administrators are able to track all of the items that go through the approval process.

 

I like that you can create as many different workflows as needed, each with multiple levels of review. There is lots of flexibility so that you can establish a process that fits your company's specific needs. That's good because every company I talk to seems to have its own unique review requirements.

 

Will multi-level approvals open up new opportunities for you to use Pageflex Storefront with document types you couldn’t consider using it for previously?

New Module: Adobe InDesign CS4 Server Offering for Pageflex Server Customers

Hi. When I was asked to pick my favorite new Pageflex 7.5 feature I found the choice to be difficult. I'm Jeff Perk, and as the Director of Product Management at Pageflex I know each new capability is vital to at least a few customers. Case in point: after we announced last June the availability of Adobe InDesign CS4 Server with Pageflex Storefront, we had Pageflex Server customers asking when they, too, could take advantage of an end-to-end InDesign workflow. We put the elves in Santa's Workshop (aka Pageflex Engineering) to work modifying the Pageflex Server API, and voila! just in time for the holidays we've squeezed this wish-list item into our sleigh.

By purchasing our new InDesign CS4 Server offering for Pageflex Server, you can now programmatically submit InDesign-based jobs for processing. Moreover, the InDesign Server can run side-by-side on the same hardware as the traditional Pageflex composition engine that you know and love.

So why not submit InDesign jobs directly to InDesign Server? Ahhh, well, because of the secret sauce that Pageflex adds. First you develop your jobs using Pageflex Studio ID, a plug-in to InDesign CS4, which gives you Adobe's industry-leading graphic design capabilities and the centralized project environment, variable setup, and document actions that Pageflex users all value, together on your PC or Mac. (You read that right: Pageflex has a product for the Mac!)

After designing your templates and configuring your job on your desktop computer, you move all the files to where Pageflex Server can find them so that the final document gets composed and output via InDesign Server (assuming it's licensed). But--and here's possibly the best part--even though the final output comes from InDesign, you can take advantage of all the scalable load-balancing and queue-managing capabilities that Pageflex Server Administrator has to offer. How cool is that?

If you're interested in learning more about this InDesign Server option, please contact your Pageflex sales representative or email your salesperson.

The upcoming Pageflex 7.5 release includes many new features that we are highlighting this week and next on this blog. Please keep checking back to learn about all the great new things our elves have been busy building. I'm confident you'll find something from your wish list. In the meantime I'm wondering what types of projects your company does today would benefit from using InDesign throughout the full production process?

Follow Pageflex on Twitter

Are you on Twitter?  We're now @pageflexinfo, and we'll be tweeting about industry news, marketing trends, tips for succeeding with brand management, web-to-print, VDP, and PURLs. And of course we'll post Pageflex product news that we think our Twitter followers would like to know. I invite you to follow us.

We'd love to hear about your Pageflex experiences, links to public sites you've built with Pageflex, and your thoughts on marketing and document production in the 21st Century. We're using #Pageflex for general Pageflex discussions and #Pageflex75 for ones specific to 7.5, our newest release.

Can you recommend any Twitter feeds that are worth following for good information on web-to-print, variable data, pURLs, etc? We're looking for worthwhile feeds to follow. So, if your company has a feed or you have one you like, leave a comment and let us know who to read!

Cross-Media in the Automotive Market: Selling, Implementing, and Evolving

We've got a wonderful opportunity for you to learn more about cross-media in the automotive market with this month's PODI Webinar. Pageflex customers Tim Graham and Chris Stainton of OTC Systems are going to be October's speakers. They'll be talking about how they developed, sold and implemented Accelerate, their innovative dealer marketing solution encompassing print, pURLs, emails and advertising on October 21st at 11:00 AM EST.

OTC Systems' integration of Pageflex Server into Accelerate won one of last year's Pageflex Customer Innovation Awards. They took the "Best Use of Pageflex Technology to Advance Marketing Automation" for a self-promotion campaign they created and produced to market a new direct mail format to a select group of automotive dealerships in Canada. The campaign re-introduced OTC Systems and its services to each dealer, while providing specific examples of what the actual direct mail piece would look like to the auto dealer’s clients. The direct mail piece utilized extensive personalized graphics, and directed dealers to a pURL that allowed them to instantly create, approve and submit artwork as well as upload their database for cleaning.

Normally, you would need to be a PODI member or pay $125 in order to attend. But, because Pageflex is sponsoring this event, we're offering complimentary registrations.  Please click here to register.  Tim and Chris are wonderful speakers who pepper their presentations with examples and anecdotes from their time in the trenches. We'd highly recommend attending! 

Great Short-Term Discount for DMA Conference

Pageflex will be exhibiting at the Direct Marketing Association’s premier event, The DMA09 Conference & Exhibition, October 17 – 22 in San Diego, California.

There will be over 150 educational sessions covering every aspect of direct and interactive marketing, dozens of targeted networking events, celebrated keynote speakers including Martha Stewart, and of course, more than 500 exhibitors.

If you’ve been considering attending the conference, but haven’t registered yet, we have a great short-term deal that the DMA sent us. Register by this Friday, September 25 and use discount code AN610 to receive a $300 discount plus 1 free night hotel stay!

If you're at the show, please stop by and see us! You can learn more and register online here.

 

Here's the fine print:

 

Thoughts from the 2009 TransPromo Summit- Develop a Messaging Strategy

A couple of weeks ago I attended the TransPromo Summit in Boston. Pageflex was a sponsor, and I had the opportunity to sit in on several of the conference sessions that dealt with executing successful transpromo campaigns. The concept of developing a messaging strategy came up in multiple sessions. Since the conference ended, I’ve continued to think about how a messaging strategy is essential for most of our customers regardless of whether you are doing a transpromo statement or a personalized direct mail campaign. In my experience, message planning is often done ad hoc and under the pressure of deadlines. While projects with a large personalization or content customization component often have a large number of variable messages, they also often lack a strategy for maintaining, refreshing, and evolving those messages as the prospect or customer lifecycle evolves.

So what is a messaging strategy?

Growing Your Business Using Public Relations

This month's Tips and Bits webinar is on Growing Your Business Using Public Relations. If you've ever wondered how you can combine traditional PR strategies and social media opportunities to promote your business and achieve more prominence your market it's worth joining us this week. Our speaker is Marion Williams-Bennett, Pageflex's Marketing Specialist. Many of you may know Marion from her popular presentations at last year's user conference or from her work matching Pageflex customers with press opportunities, speaking engagements and applications for industry awards.  She's an engaging speaker who brings years of print industry public relations knowledge to the table.

Marion will be leading this month's Tips and Bits webinar on Thursday, August 20th at 2:00 PM Eastern time. She's put together a wonderfully informative presentation focused specifically on PR for printers and marketers. To register for this or any other Pageflex webinar, please visit pageflex.com/webinars. We hope you can join us!