Tips and Bits

Thanks!

It’s Thanksgiving this week in the US. Many companies will post messages this week to customers thanking them for their loyalty. We are no exception. The Pageflex User Conference earlier this month was a vivid reminder of the creativity, intelligence, and passion that our customers bring to the variety of cool projects that they produce using Pageflex software. We do appreciate your work and your loyalty. And wish you a happy Thanksgiving holiday.

Over the past week I’ve been thinking about how I am grateful for the Bitstream type and MyFonts teams that have co-existed with the Pageflex team during the decade I’ve been with the company. In our US office we sit intermingled. The folks on the type and MyFonts teams add to the flavor of the office. The energy, individual quirks and characters, the Monday morning weekend stories, and the kitchen chatter. Not to mention the silly type-inspired Yankee swap gifts that bring laughter at our holiday party each year.

At nearly every tradeshow I’ve attended at least one person stops by the Pageflex booth and reminisces about visiting the Bitstream offices years ago or the fonts that they buy from Bitstream. It has been a continual reminder that strong typography has always been at the heart of our Pageflex composition tools.

I’ve met graphic designers at cocktail parties, reunions, and on the playground who don’t know Pageflex, but whose face lights up when I mention that our sister product line is My Fonts. They excitedly tell me how much they love the site and how awesome the WhatTheFont type identification tool is. I always feel a bit more hip after these conversations.

And then there are the regular internal “Tip of the Day” emails from our type colleagues in India that have taught us what a Glyph Origin, CamelCase, hinting, and countless other industry terms mean. And, of course, the stories of the early days of Bitstream.

As we now embark on creating separate businesses, it seems like a fitting time to remember our shared history. So this holiday I send a “Thank You” and “All the Best” to our font and MyFonts colleagues!

New Pageflex Web Site

Today we launched a redesign of the Pageflex web site. I invite you to visit www.pageflex.com to check it out. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions, either here in the comments or at marketing@pageflex.com.

This is just the beginning. Over time we plan to add more information for and about our customers, updates to the support site, educational information about our products and the industries we serve, and interactivity. We’d love to hear what you would like to find on the site.

Now at www.pageflex.com you will find customer case studies and quotes about how companies are benefiting from using Pageflex software. If you’d like to share a successful project or your feelings about Pageflex, drop us a line at marketing@pageflex.com. If we post your quote, we’ll link back to your site so that our visitors can check out your business too.

Pageflex will continue to be featured on the Bitstream web site, but the fresher content is at www.pageflex.com. For instance, the new site has an up-to-date list of upcoming training classes. So if you have old bookmarks, but want access to current content, point your browser at www.pageflex.com.

Pageflex Welcomes Our New Press-sense Colleagues and Customers

Hello, I'm Anna Magliocco-Chagnon, President and CEO of Bitstream. Today we announced the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Press-sense, including the IP. This is an exciting point in the history of Bitstream. I want to welcome the Press-sense employees, customers, partners, and distributors to Bitstream.

 

We have committed to continue iWay and Press-sense manager product development, maintain the Press-sense office in Israel, and continue to support the OEM partners and customers that have chosen to make the Press-sense iWay and Manager technologies a major component of their production workflow solution. The Press-sense products will join Bitstream’s Pageflex publishing product line.

HP, Océ, and Xerox have all expressed support for Bitstream as the new owner of the iWay technology and we expect to continue and expand these relationships.

Some of our Pageflex customers also own a Press-sense product. We know that the recent months have been anxious ones for Press-sense customers as you awaited word of what would happen with Press-sense. We hope that you will give us the opportunity to support you and work with you during this transition.  We look forward to hearing your feedback on how we can further develop our software to meet your needs. There are many things we have not had time to address yet. We ask for your patience as we work through the details and integrate our teams.

Among other strengths, Pageflex is known for its knowledgeable, friendly support team and powerful, published APIs and SDKs that enable and simplify the process of extending our products and integrating them with third-party systems. We fully intend to invest necessary resources to bring these two qualities to our new iWay products. To that end we will retain nearly all of the current Press-sense employees. They know the technology intimately, they know you well, and they know your concerns and needs.

Our initial focus will be on stabilizing the iWay product, addressing immediate functionality issues (those pesky bugs), and actively supporting those of you who are on current support contracts.

We have posted an FAQ at press-sense.bitstream.com along with additional information. I further welcome your feedback and questions here and at iWay-acquisition@bitstream.com.

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!