As a printing company, you are often asked to create content with the databases of your customers. Product catalogs, flyers, posters, and so on. Let's talk about a couple of the options you have to use the DMP FLO Suite for this.
Real time integrations
We're often asked if it is possible to connect in real time to the product (or employee) databases of end customers. Obviously this is possible. And we've done it. SQL connections to existing Progress databases, OCI connections to SAP systems, web2print solutions that connect to the phonebook webservices of a bank's intranet, and so on. The technical side of these integrations usually isn't the big issue. Much more time consuming is the security aspect of an external server having access to the databases. So as a printing company, it's usually not so obvious to set up this type of connection.
But if both parties are open and willing to come to an agreement, it is always possible to set up straight connections. This way, no replication of data needs to take place, and end users always have access to the live data for their database publishing solutions or their printing on demand applications.
Complete imports
Another solution is to import the external database into the FLO Suite databases, and use them from there for the web2print application. The import file can pretty much be any format (as long as there is logic). So you don't have to force the programmers of your customer to create big applications to export data in a custom way. csv, xls, tab delimited text, xml files, or any type of structured output can be imported into the FLO Suite databases, and transformed in a way that everything is ready for database publishing purposes.
Partial imports and synchronization
But the size of the customization projects on the other side (in the source database) often results in a system where the import only contains partial data. Technical information, pricing, logistical data and so on are imported from the original system. In the FLO Suite, marketing gets the possibility to easily add marketing information to each of the products. These fields can be added by your administrators, or even by the marketing department itself. Filling in the information of the products can be done by product managers and other people from your customer.
The entire database can of course be set up to conform to the business rules of the customer. Rather than doing transformations during the import, fields can be set up to be calculated from other information. Images from the digital asset management solution can be linked automatically to the products, barcodes can be generated, and so on.
PIMS services
Often, this results in a complete set of PIMS related services. The database in the FLO Suite is not the master database (that would be too invasive for the end customer), but in real life it does often become the source database for all marketing purposes. Enriching the data (and adding new fields) is so easy, that the database is not just used for database publishing of the printed materials (by using InDesign Server templates), but also for publication to external content management systems, exports to other marketing workflows, and so on.