Tips and Bits

Pageflex 7.6 Beta Preview Webinar: Calling all potential beta testers!

Calling all early adopters: the Pageflex Beta Program is looking for additional volunteers to provide us with feedback on our forthcoming release. If you think you have what it takes (time, inclination, and a spare server), please join Jeff Perk, Director of Product Management, next Tuesday, August 10 at high noon (Eastern Time) for a Webex overview of Pageflex 7.6 features. Participants will be able to walk away from the presentation with a beta download of the new release, and be eligible for joining our on-going series of usability focus tests for future development initiatives. Participants should be current Pageflex customers on support. Space is limited, so sign up now!

Click here to register for the event.

Webinar: Updated Server Submission Libraries with Vinny Myles

Please join Pageflex's Director of Support and Services, Vinny Myles, on July 14th at 2:00 PM EST for a discussion about updates to the Server submission libraries (pfsubmit). Vinny will be sharing sample code and discussing best practices for submitting documents to Pageflex Server.

This webinar will be highly technical in nature and it will assume programmatic knowledge of Pageflex Server. This event is for Pageflex customers only.

Click here to register.

New Plug-In: QR Code Generator

Pageflex is pleased to announce a new QR code generating content source plug-in available for Studio 7.5.2 when used with Storefront, Campaign Manager or Pageflex Server. The plug-in is available free of charge to clients on support.  To get the plug-in, please log in to the Pageflex Support Site and search for "QR". Alternately, the answer ID of the tech note is #427.  The plug-in is downloadable from the tech note.

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes designed to be read with a QR code reader app installed on a user's mobile phone. The reader typically uses the camera of the phone to scan the code, which usually contains either a link to a web address, personal contact information, or a short message about a product.

QR codes are primarily used in marketing programs as a response mechanism, so try them on your direct mail pieces, brochures, business cards, and trans-promotional statements. Pageflex's QR code generator can generate generic QR codes with one URL, such as the one linking to Pageflex.com above, or individualized QR codes that take users to a pURL or gURL. 

Some tips for successful QR codes: 

• White Space Matters - Give the QR code some room in your design. A bit of white space around the code dramatically improves the readability of the code. And, larger codes are easier for mobile phone cameras to focus on, so try to make your codes at least 1 inch by 1 inch. The Pageflex plug-in will let you specify the size of your code.

• Provide an Alternate Link - Because QR codes are new and not every reader reads every QR code, it's very important to provide an alternate link to web pages you want users to visit. If space is tight, consider a URL shortener.

• Test Your QR Codes with a Variety of Readers -  QR code readers are evolving rapidly. There are a plethora of readers available. We've enjoyed using QuickMark  on the iPhone and several Android mobiles. And, BeeTagg was great on the Blackberry. You can test your QR code reader (and enjoy some font humor! ) with these Pageflex-generated QR codes.

                               

                             

We hope you enjoy the QR code generator!

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!

Replay Recent Webinars at Your Convenience

After each of our popular webinars, we get asked if it was recorded. Some people have a conflict and can’t attend at the time we broadcast it, and others simply want to hear parts of it again. So we’ve been experimenting with various technologies to make this happen. And I’m very happy to announce that our awesome webinar production team has recorded our last two webinars and posted them in our support knowledgebase. You can see what was shown on screen and hear the full audio. These webinar recordings are available to all Pageflex customers with active support contracts.

 

If you’d like to understand the API enhancements that happened with the new Pageflex Storefront 7.5 release, please see Answer ID #411. Pageflex Principal Software Engineer, Chris Reisz-Hanson, and Product Manager, Jeff Perk, discuss what these changes mean for anyone thinking about upgrading customer extensions and their Pageflex Storefront deployments.

 

Answer ID #405 in the support knowledgebase will give you an in-depth look at building long documents with Pageflex Studio or Persona. During this webinar, Nikki McNurlen, Pageflex's Senior Training Specialist, covered three key long document skills:

 

1. Using Document Variables - Document variables allow you to dynamically insert and remove pages from a document. Nikki teaches you how to create them and how to insert them into a Pageflex template.

2. Filler Pages - Did you know that Pageflex templates can be programmed to automatically round long documents up to a specific printable signature? Nikki shows you how to make sure that you don't end up with 7 page brochures by creating variable filler pages. She also covers how to use filler pages to do things like force the beginning of a chapter in a book to a right hand page. The webinar also touches on the use of master pages for managing filler page designs.

3. Dynamic Tables of Contents - Last, but not least, you'll learn how to build a dynamic table of contents and insert page numbers to finish off your book or brochure.

Pageflex 7.5 is Available!

 Hello, I’m Katherine Reisz-Hanson, Director of Pageflex Product Marketing. I’m happy to announce that Pageflex 7.5 is available as of today. Our Storefront, Campaign Manager, Server, and Studio products all have something new to offer with this release. Thank you to all of you that have been eagerly reading this blog and our Twitter feed (@pageflexinfo) over the past few weeks to learn about the new capabilities that will be available with this upgrade. There have been more than 100 of you checking in daily!

This release really is the Pageflex team’s present to our customers this holiday season. While we know there are still more features you really want (there always will be more!), our engineering team really worked to include some of the most requested capabilities across our product line. We focused on capabilities that will make you more productive, your marketing communications more effective, and your customer’s online experiences more pleasant and rewarding. If you’re interested in upgrading to 7.5, please contact support@pageflex.com. And if you are not an existing Pageflex customer, please contact sales@pageflex.com.

And there’s still one more new treat I want to tell everyone about. It’s the Pageflex Storefront feature I am most looking forward to using myself.  Pageflex 7.5 includes a new Storefront UI theme called “Corporate.” This optional site design is targeted at deployments serving document fulfillment workflows rather than e-commerce Web-to-print businesses. The Corporate theme illustrates how simple changes to a deployment’s nomenclature can help separate your brand management activities from your e-commerce workflows.

What about Pageflex 7.5 has you excited?

 

Pageflex 7.5 Preview Webinars for Current Customers

 

Some of you may have seen this in email last week, but just as a quick reminder, Jeff Perk, Pageflex's Director of Product Management, will be hosting two webinars previewing our 7.5 release next week. The dates and times are December 16th at 2:00 PM EST and December 17th at 10:00 AM EST. The content of the two webinars will be identical, so there's no need to attend both. These webinars are for current customers only, please. If you're currently evaluating Pageflex, please contact your sales representative for more information on Pageflex 7.5

Click here to register for the 2:00 PM Webinar on the 16th.

Click here to register for the 10:00 AM Webinar on the 17th.

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?

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?

Drawing on Friday for Two Transpromo Summit Passes - $3200 value

Update: Congrats to Ed and Alberto, our two winners! See you at the show!

Pageflex is exhibiting at the 2009 Transpromo Summit in Boston, MA on August 13th-14th. We have two complimentary passes available and we're going to be holding two drawings-- one for each pass, this Friday afternoon at 5:00 PM Eastern. These two passes are worth approximately $3200.00. If you were to purchase these, each pass would be $1,195. Additionally, each pass comes with a copy of Infotrends' Ultimate Guide to Enterprise TransPromo Solutions: Document Composition, which is an additional $399 value. If you're interested in learning more about how to market with statements and other transactional documents, this event is for you.

To find out more about the 2009 Transpromo Summit, click here .

We'll be bringing Pageflex Chart, our new charting and graphing plug-in for Pageflex Persona, Pageflex Server, and Pageflex Storefront, to the event. If you stop by the Pageflex booth in the Adrienne de Lafayette salon we'd be glad to show you our transpromo technologies in action.

To register for the drawing you'll need to fill out the form after the break or email your name, contact information, and email address to Ben Ricci at bricci@pageflex.com. Your email address is required-- the winner will be notified and the passes delivered via email. We're only counting one registration per person, so stuffing the ballot box won't help your odds. You can, however, encourage co-workers to register to increase your company's chance of winning. The winner of each of the drawings will win one of the two passes.

Good luck and we hope to see you in Boston!