You probably don't need an introduction about JDF. It's one of the major hypes in the graphics industy of the past years. Unfortionately, until recently the practical implementations didn't quite live up to the hype. But that's changing. More and more vendors and MIS systems are ready for wide scale implementations.
And of course we are following this trend. JDF integrations are a major part of our new release. In the past, we were rather reluctant to make a big deal of JDF. Obviously we had the implementations. All orders in Design Online, the web to print solution we built for Fortis, are passed to the iGens with JDF. Huge amounts of weekly retail orders at Drukkerij De Jong are transmitted to Apogee with JDF connections. But those were ad hoc implementations. Built very quickly with a single purpose.
But after seeing that more and more other parties are actually getting their implementations together, we decided to make it more standard. While we still follow a very pragmatic aproach, it will be easy for our customers to finalize our implementations. Instead of following the entire JDF manual, we went to talk to the major players, and are in the process of creating JDF templates for most of their systems. Rather that building huge documents, we're going for an aproach where as little information as possible is needed for the maximum efficiency. Where features are needed that we haven't implemented yet, integrators get the tools to add them themselves.
And we're confident that the potential for practical JDF will only grow over the next few years. The partners we have been talking to are practically all ready for major implementations. And even more important: most of them have put them to use already. The old days of: "We've got a JDF compliant system. Just tell us what you need, and we can make it!" are finally over. Finally, almost everyone can show that they have something.
But that's not to say that JDF is always the way to go. Sure, there are huge advantages. But as with all standards, there will always be limitations. And trying to remove all limitations typically leads to huge and hard to understand formats. So in some cases, proprietary formats will remain the way to go. While JDF is a great way to communicate job creation, in some cases a very simple text or xml file might do the same. Faster. And easier.