Tips and Bits

How to Successfully Implement a Web-to-Print System

"In my experience, there is about 30% adoption of web-to-print in the companies I visit and only about 50% have it working well and are successful in making it a profitable part of their business.”

        Howie Fenton, Senior Technology Consultant at NAPL

Is your business one of them?

How do you look beneath the hype and find the web-to-print solution that's right for your business? This informative webinar will help printers determine what they want to achieve with web-to-print and learn how the right technology can help deliver on those goals.  The webinar will include helpful tips from Pageflex and real world examples from customers who have been successful with web-to-print.

Join us!

Pageflex will be offering this webinar on Wednesday, January 18 at 10:00 a.m. (GMT-05:00) and at 2:00 p.m.  (GMT-05:00) 

To register, simply follow the links below:

Wednesday, January 18 at 10:00 a.m.

Wednesday, January 18 at 2:00 p.m.

 

Pageflex SaaS

Graph Expo is off to a great start for Pageflex!

At the opening of the show, we announced the availability of Pageflex SaaS, a comprehensive service that gives users  the tools, technology and expertise they need to quickly and easily expand their business by selling customized documents and items online.

We created Pageflex SaaS to be a service that brings together all the resources and infrastructure customers need to launch web document customization sites for their own business or as part of their marketing organization. 

Users subscribe to the service on a monthly basis and have access to a full range of services, including:

- Online web catalogs (business-to-business and business-to consumer)
- Full e-commerce capabilities
- Order approval workflows for business-to-business implementations
- Automatic email notifications
- Shipment to multiple addresses
- Site skinning and localization
- Support for multiple product types, including:
     - PDF files uploaded by end users to be printed
     - Static documents that can be ordered
     - Products available from inventory
     - Customizable documents

More details can be found in our press release, or by emailing sales@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.

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.”

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.

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 Feature: Usability and Productivity Enhancements to Pageflex Storefront

Happy Holidays! I’m Tim Brandt. With our upcoming Pageflex 7.5 release, I’m looking forward to all of the usability and productivity enhancements that have been made to Pageflex Storefront.

 

As a Pageflex Business Development Manager, I talk every day with companies that are looking for ways to make their businesses more efficient and profitable. Pageflex Storefront let’s them focus more resources on their core business, and less on site development and IT management. Pageflex 7.5 adds a number of improvements for both Pageflex Storefront site administrators and end users. Here are some of the usability enhancements I know customers will appreciate:

 

· Preview Data Merge Jobs  - For any Pageflex print product that includes a data list step, you may configure a preview job that lets your end users proof a subset of their data records. For each product you can choose which preview job to use and the number of records to preview. Enhancing your customer’s user experience with a composite preview of the actual data merged against the template design promotes confidence in submitting and ordering the job for final production, as well as helping them recognize the value of personalization capabilities delivered in real time!

· Customizable Shopping Cart  - With version 7.5 the Pageflex Storefront shopping cart is entirely configurable to best suit the information needs and shopping styles of your typical users.

· Support for Product Codes and SKUs – Your customers now can search for a product using its SKU or product code so that you can tie your site activity in with your other promotional activities, such as a print catalog. With 7.5 these now are among the default product fields configurable by deployers. If a SKU is assigned to a product it is visible to admin users.

· More HTML Insert Options – Pageflex 7.5 gives you more opportunities to do advertisements and cross-sell promotions on your Pageflex Storefront site. You now can add HTML inserts on the end users’ “My Profile” page and the order summary page. You can even include them in the new shipping address book.

· Highly Configurable IDs – You now have much more flexibility with the naming convention for Order IDs and Document IDs. Within the Storefront Administrator UI you can set the prefixes, set a deployment code, and follow an all-numeric or the traditional alphanumeric sequence. This flexibility allows you to make the IDs an information source that is more human readable and in synch with other tracking syntax you use in your business.

My Pageflex colleagues have already blogged about some of the other new features coming to Pageflex Storefront and still more are to come in the next few days so keep reading this blog. Our team would love to hear what you think of these posts so please leave us your comments.

 

New Feature: Split Shipping and an Integrated Address Book Come to Pageflex Storefront

Hi. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Pageflex 7.5. It includes a feature that the Pageflex Storefront customers I work with really want: split shipping. Pageflex Storefront deployers can choose to activate split shipping on a per-deployment basis. I’m Leslie Wengenroth, a Business Development Manager at Pageflex, and I’m also excited that we’ve now integrated an address book, previously available only via a Pageflex Storefront extension, as a standard feature.

 

If you’ve ever shopped online for both yourself and someone else at the same time, you can probably understand the value of offering split shipping. It is useful for both B-to-C and B-to-B sites. With split shipping, your customers who place multi-item orders are given the option to ship these items to multiple destinations. If they want, every single item in the order can go to a unique shipping address. The customer encounters only a single payment or billing process. Even the shipping method can vary item by item. For instance, a customer can place one quantity of an item into the shopping cart for expedited shipment and another quantity of the same item for standard shipment.

 

For consumer sites, the holidays are just one example of when split shipping can buy you goodwill with your customers. If you simplify their shopping experience, they’ll remember to come shop at your site again. For instance, at a site that offers personalized products a user could order a bookmark for each of her nieces and nephews—each with a different image and the kid’s name printed on the bookmark—and have them sent directly to each kid’s house. Rather than go through the entire ordering process for each gift, the customer can order everything once and then during the checkout process indicate the address where each item should be sent. The integrated address book lets customers quickly select addresses from a drop-down list of nicknames or aliases. This address book is available whether or not split shipping is turned on.

 

In the demos I’ve seen of Pageflex 7.5 I really like that at every step of the split-shipping process there is complete visibility as to what items are going where. While the interface guides users step-by-step to ensure that all of the required fields are completed, the end user can freely navigate among the different shipments and make any last-minute corrections.

 

Have your customers been asking for split shipping?

 
  

New 7.5 Feature: Copy Products Across Deployments

Hi, I’m Jillian Patterson and one of my favorite features in Pageflex 7.5 is the ability to copy products from one deployment to another. As an applications specialist at Pageflex, my job is really similar to a lot of yours -- I tag templates and create new Pageflex Storefront sites every day. While some products are unique, many of them are similar or even exactly the same as ones I’ve created many times before. I know this is true for the vast majority of our customers that host more than one Pageflex Storefront deployment, so I think you’ll really like this feature, too.

 Pageflex 7.5 will make the process of managing multiple deployments much easier. Admin users can choose to copy product definitions, forms and project assets to a new location. Similarly, with just a couple clicks of the mouse Admins can copy all of the attributes of the fields belonging to a specific HTML form, such as the shipping step or the user profile page, between products in the same or different deployments.

 What will you do with all of your new extra time?

 

New Centered Theme Available for Storefront 7.0

According to our post-sales and support teams, we've had quite a few requests for a Pageflex Storefront theme that fixes the width of the primary panels and centers them in the browser. Fortunately, it's quite possible to implement using a bit of CSS. Cheryl Watson, one of our post-sales specialists who does quite a bit of work with site skinning, has created a tutorial on how to accomplish it using our Graphite theme. The tutorial includes all of the images you'll need, a modified site.css file, the HTML for the header and a how-to document. We've tested it in Firefox and IE and it looks great.

If you'd like to download the tutorial, click here to be taken to Support's knowledge base. If you're already in the support site, the article is answer ID number 385.

Additionally, the Spring, Spring Simple, Deco, Copper, Original Graphite and Boston themes are still available for download. While they can be used just as they are, they also make great starting places for creating your own theme. We suggest picking one that's structurally similar to the theme you would like to create. Then, modify it to fit your desired look and feel by changing the imagery, colors and header. These themes are also available on the support site. The download kit is available at answer number 213. You can also click here to be taken directly to it. As always, you'll need to have your user name and password ready.

Enjoy the new theme.