More and more, people are talking about web2print applications. But before this term became popular, there was a lot of talk about printing on demand solutions. Obviously the terms can often be mixed, but let's go over a couple of the possibilities for printing on demand in the FLO Suite.
Digital printing on demand
When printing on demand solutions are used to feed digital presses through a website, it's pretty much the same as a web2print application. End users log in, select their content, and order them. The output is processed in a way that minimizes production time, and delivered to the user. A difference might be that web2print solutions are often considered to have more variable data functionalities, whereas printing on demand is more about pre-defined content (e.g.: PDF files that were uploaded to the digital asset management solution).
And as printing on demand solutions might traditionally depend more often on pre-existing documents and content, they are by nature also more B2B oriented. A web2print solution is not (especially in the case of general storefronts).
Database publishing on demand
Since printing on demand is more about the content, it also has more affinity with database publishing. Creating product catalogs on the fly (which can be automatically generated), but also selection of appropriate content. As we speak, I'm working on a perfect example of prospectus documents for a university. Rather than automatically creating the individual pages for each course, the focus there (because of the time it will save) is on the gathering of content, and the creation of a personalized prospectus. Each prospective student will receive a document with all of the courses he or she is interested in. The composition of this document is done completely on the fly, including variable texts with his personal information. And probably the creation of the individual course pages will be automated in a later stage using InDesign Server.
End user in control
The important thing about printing on demand is that it puts the end user in control. Output options, content, variable parts, and so on can all be put into the hands of the end user. In some cases this means a central marketing department. And then the amount of freedom can be quite large. After all, that marketing department set up the brand rules and communication guidelines. Often that means that they can be trusted to make the right decisions in content. But in many cases it also means real end users (bank employees, supermarket owners, real estate agents) who do not have the knowledge of the company brand. And in such cases, restrictions are made to the possibilities and options they can choose from.
Printing on demand without a web interface
While printing on demand solutions often run behind an online interface (like a web2print application), this is not always the case. There are some tools out there that are at least as common to marketing departments as a web browser. Microsoft Excel is just one example. Creating structured content to initiate a prepress workflow can be done in a lot of ways based on the existing (or newly defined) files that the marketing department already works with.