flo-suite

Any FLO Media Viewer Server Edition comes with a configurator for Enfocus Switch. This allows customers to create flash books from their Swith Flows.

FLO Media Viewer, the new flash book product by DMP, integrates callas pdfToolbox to allow customers to create flash-based reports of problems found when preflighting a PDF file.

FLO Media Viewer can be used to visualize InDesign documents. This way, designers can send versions of their artwork to end customers without needing to send a printable PDF. It also allows for some very nice other creative workflows.

DMP has just released its new product: FLO Media Viewer. A short overview of features and functionalities.

Our customers buy DMP FLO Suite to do business. And we try to help them with this by continuously adding value to the software they purchased. The latest effort in this regard is the development of a filesharing application.

A lot of web2print applications built with DMP FLO Suite use Variable Data templates as the source of orders. These templates (using InDesign Server or PDF technology) allow end users to generate new content on the fly. And in such a case, PDF preflighting isn't typically required (as long as uploaded images are checked). But in many cases, a web2print storefront also allows end users to upload artwork. A potential source of many problems, but luckily we integrate callas pdfToolbox in our software.

The primary aim of our customers is to fill the presses. Some of our customers are full service marketing providers, combining their printing activities with a whole new set of offerings. But even in those cases, the core activity remains printing. One way of promoting this is to add additional value to the services. Providing marketing tools for the end customers, for example.

One of the standard components in DMP FLO Suite is the InDesign Server. And it plays an important role in our cross media publishing capabilities. While it is true that it is not a required engine for a lot of campaigns, there are campaigns which simply wouldn't be quite as cross as they could be.

We have been adding some content to our website about frietjes. French fries, but with a belgian twist. The twist is that we make them better. We blog about them because we like them. But more importantly: we blog about them to show that anyone can use our content management system to get good results on Google. Even with irrelevant keywords.

Because of our visit to the Henry Stewart DAM event next week in New York, we were contacted by several customers and partners. They were wondering if we changed our strategy regarding our Digital Asset Management module. In the past, we have never profiled ourselves as a player on the DAM market. And not a lot has changed in this. But that doesn't mean that we (and even more important: our customers) do a lot of good business with projects that start out as DAM, but end as complete publishing workflows.

A lot of account managers and sales persons are reluctant to get on board of the ongoing evolution in the direction of web2print solutions. They fear that an online solution for ordering prints might interfere with their contact with the customer. And that contact is needed to guarantee more orders in the future.

Enfocus Switch is a great tool for the automation of your prepress workflows. DMP FLO Suite is a great tool for the automation of your online marketing processes. And the DMP FLO Suite Configurator for Enfocus Switch is the ideal solution to bring the two together.

More and more of our customers are adding content management services to their offerings. Hosting anything from small mini-sites to complete websites, they go a step further in becoming full service providers. It seems a logical step, since they often already have most of the information needed to build the website.

Web2print applications are often associated with the simple online ordering of print orders (where the user supplies a PDF file to be printed). In more and more cases printing companies are including variable data templates in this process. End users go online and create their own business cards, flyers, brochures and so on. But more and more, this output is also used to feed direct mailing campaigns.

Are you thinking about implementing a web2print application? If it's a custom project for one of your large accounts, you can find some other posts on this site that point you in the right direction. But what if you want to create a single web2print solution for all of your end customers? Here are some things you will have to consider when starting the project.

Most of the database publishing that is done with DMP FLO Suite is done based on templates. A prepress department sets up rules in an InDesign document, and our implementation on top of InDesign Server executes these rules and creates InDesign packages or PDF files as output. All of it without any programming or scripting. But in some cases, the logic is just too customer-specific. And as usual, the FLO Suite still allows you to handle those cases.

While DMP FLO Suite comes with a lot of pre-built applications (including web2print solutions), its true power lies in flexibility. The flexibility to rapidly deploy new marketing solutions such as web2print applications, for example.

All too often, an inhouse publishing or marketing department is not able to turn completely to the IT department for help in setting up marketing tools. We see that more and more of our customers are taking up this role instead. Offering help with the development of customized web2print applications or highly specialized database publishing workflows.

A while ago, one of the primary purposes of digital asset management services was to bind the customer. Owning the images and content was a very good way to make sure that the customer would not leave to another service provider. As SaaS and cloud computing become more accepted, this behaviour has diminished. Rather than focussing on customer binding with content ownerschip, a lot of companies are using service and functionalities.

web2print applications are often associated with simple variable data documents. Stationary supplies, simple POS materials, and so on. But as you probably know by now, our customers use the DMP FLO Suite for a lot more complex stuff. Web2print solutions with online generation of catalogs, flyers, brochures, and so on. One of the variations that is often used is to create a personalized brochure for the user, and then personalize it a second time for end users or customers...

We are often asked if the FLO Suite can be used to set up personalized URL's. Well, we are a quite complete marketing toolbox. Digital asset management, database publishing, web2print, and of course cross media publishing. It would be a bit of a shame if we couldn't do pURL campaigns, wouldn't it?

As we're spreading internationally, we're meeting with a lot of new sales people ready to tackle the world. Most of them are quite good at what they do (thank you, Four Pees, for the good contacts!). But a lot of them at one time or another ask us this question. The answer is simple.

Well, sometimes you do. It really depends on what your goals are. If you want to keep it simple and fast, then you probably don't (although maybe there might be a little bit of work involved if you want to link everything to your own production environment). But then again, maybe you're going after the major accounts. Each of them will have very specific demands for their web2print front site. Have you considered how they are going to be realized?

A new stage in the graphical sector has been started. Digital asset management was the hype once, and became reality afterwards. Web2print solutions followed as the next hype, and are pretty much commonplace now. Cross media publishing solutions are still not completely common, but they're getting there. So I can't help but wonder what the next big thing for printing companies will be. Would they dare take the plunge in Social Media Services?

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.

One reason to get started with digital asset management or web2print is the consistency of your brand. More and more, printing companies are taking a central role in these brand management efforts.

Flexibility is our trademark. We want our customers to make money on our software, and one of the ways to do this is having a system where they don't have to say no to end customer's wishes too often. For that purpose, a development environment is embedded in our solution. If we don't have the required functionalities yet, you can develop them yourself, or ask an integrator to do it. One of the new features is an API which can be used by external systems to use the FLO Suite functionalities from their own application.

For a couple of months I've been trying to show that our content management system is perfectly capable of placing websites on the first page of Google if you just apply the standard SEO rules to your website. I've been doing this by using Frietjes as a keyword. In the mean time we've got plenty of other examples (just take a look at our own website, it draws a high daily amount of new visitors from Google), but I'm getting complaints from customers and partners when I don't talk about frietjes for a couple of weeks. As if I don't have better things to do.

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.

The DMP FLO Suite contains a lot of different ways to approach database publishing and web2print solutions. Rather than focus on a single approach (such as using InDesign Server), we followed a development path where multiple options exist. This way, the chance that you can't meet your end customer's specific needs is greatly reduced.

In a recent blog I wrote about the green effects of web2print solutions. I didn't mention one of the more obvious advantages of online solutions for the environment: they often result in less printing. I was a bit afraid of going this route in my previous post, because it might be misinterpreted by some customers. But in the reactions I got on my previous blog, it seems that most printing companies (at least amongst our customers) are going this way in any case.

We just started development of a new version of the Correction Workflow. If you're interested in using this application, now is the time to let us know what you intend to do with it. We're basing the new functionalities on the implementations in the past, but additional input is always welcome.

We are often asked to provide our services in a SaaS model, where customers pay as they use the system. But since this would put us in direct competition with our own customers, we obviously can't start with this. What we can do for those prospects, howerer, is point them to one of our existing customers. They often provide services in this way.

As we are moving more and more into international sales, we are building better sales tools for a wide channel. One of those tools is our Demo Dashboard. It is a tool for sales people which gives an overview of some of the functionalities of the DMP FLO Suite, in an easy interface. And since a big part of our sales strategy has always been to have successful (and profitable) customers, we're opening this tool up for our existing customers as well. After all, the demos they have to do are often similar to our own.

Our regular readers have already started commenting on it. For a couple of days now, there has been a new function on our blog, which allows you to download each post in PDF form, or to select a number of posts and combine them in a single PDF file.

In a recent blog, I talked about the future for web2print in a cloud computing context. One part of the cloud was missing there. And it's not the most obvious one. Web2print vendors using functionalities of each other's applications. It might not seem realistic, but we feel it can and will happen.

One of our partners recently informed me that our SEO results for Frietjes have been going down. I was aware of this, and I have to admit that it is completely my own fault. But rest assured, I'm not giving up.

We recently attended DSCOOP as part of the start of DMP FLO Suite sales in the USA. The audience of DSCOOP was not the most normal croud (all of them with digital presses and all of them highly qualified), we did notice some things that are fundamentally different from web2print in Europe.

For years, DMP FLO Suite has offered the possibility to link easily with other systems. And for quite some time, this integration has included JDF links. But in the past, we often let our customers talk to the vendors of the other software. We offered a framework for the integration, and our customers used that framework to fill in the details themselves. This way production, accounting and logistics systems were linked to the FLO Suite. But for the 4.0 release of the FLO Suite, we decided to take matters more into our own hands. We sat down and talked to a large number of vendors, and did the research for a lot of standard integrations. Some of them are available already today, others will become available over the next weeks and months. But the most important part is that the tools exist to add new software integrations even more easily than before.

The new features of the DMP FLO Suite all revolve around production tools. And this is not limited to the prepress production. The single most powerful feature of the DMP FLO Suite is its flexibility, and we wanted to expand on this. So we created new tools for the production of workflows, web2print applications and other types of customized applications.

The new version of the DMP FLO Suite is all about production collaboration. And what better way to achieve this than to create an integration with a superior prepress automation tool like Enfocus Switch. On one side, DMP FLO Suite interfaces can be used to feed Enfocus Switch workflows. A web2print application, a digital printing storefront, a job submission page. They can all be created in the interface the customers want. And the end result is a PDF file or any other type of content that goes into the flow. This actually has been possible for years. But on the other side, DMP FLO Suite functionalities can now be called directly from Enfocus Switch by using the new FLO Suite Configurator.

That’s an easy question, and one we’re happy to answer. The new version of DMP FLO Suite is not for free, but you’re already paying. All new features (including the updates of the components, such as InDesign Server CS4) are included in that maintenance.

The DMP FLO Suite has always contained lots of functionalities for metadata-driven workflows. Custom modules with unlimited amounts of fields (resulting in complete PIMS applications), but also freely extensible metadata for assets in the digital asset management system. And these functionalities have now been extended with support for XMP metadata.

A large part of the new features in DMP FLO Suite 4.0 are focused on production tools for printing companies. Input control of PDF files are an essential part of these tools. Next to that, we also wanted to create some workflows where advanced information about the contents of PDF files was needed. Callas supplied the technology needed for these new features with their pdfToolbox Server 4.

The 2008 buy-out of Yawah by Adobe presented DMP with an interesting challenge. eRez, the imaging server built by Yawah and sold as a license, was an integral part of the DMP FLO Suite. It was used for image manipulation (resampling, color conversions, etc.). Next to that, it presented us with the possibility to employ streaming technology, to visualize images in a flash viewer. After the purchase of Yawah, eRez was very quickly taken off the market as a license. Future use of the technology will be restricted to ASP models, integrated into Scene7. Leaving us with a big gap in our technology. Not only did we overcome this challenge, but our software has improved because of it. Rather than try to simply replace the existing functionalities, we went in search of new possibilities. And those were found in Elpical’s Claro Single.

The new DMP FLO Suite 4.0 gives you support for InDesign Server CS4. So when should you start using it? When you're ready, ofcourse. Hmmm... this is going to be a very short post.

For the upcoming 4.0 release of the DMP FLO Suite, we had to replace the eRez functionalities with Elpical Claro Single, and the FSI viewer with our own technology. Rewriting the flash viewer gave us the opportunity to add a feature that a lot of customers have been asking for: the possibility to distribute the viewer, without needing to link it to their own server.

The FLO Suite 4.0 is out!

My apologies for the duplicate content. We're creating and distributing a lot of brochures over the next few weeks to announce our new DMP FLO Suite version. But I'm noticing that it sometimes takes a while for this information to get to all of the customers. And some of you do regularly visit our blog. So I will be posting some of the documentation here as well. Just ignore it if you have the PDF file. That reads easier.

It's a question we're hearing a lot since Drupa. And I don't blame the people who ask it. We've had a couple of good years, but we kept mostly to our own market, with a minimum of marketing efforts. And all of a sudden that changed.

When you are providing database publishing services to your customers, you will often need to use their existing databases somewhere in your workflows. In many cases this will consist of product databases (especially for database publishing workflows), and in other cases it will be employee or office databases (for example for web2print applications). Regardless of the type of data, you've got a lot of tools to make the connections happen.

They work for DMP, and they are good at what they do. And the past few weeks, they have been exceptionally good. So good, that the usual management techniques to reward them (bonusses, paintball sessions, cocktail parties, ...) just simply don't seem enough. But with all of my SEO activities of the past months, I now have new presents to give. I can put them on Google.

Like most sectors, a lot of focus is put on environmentally sound business practices for the printing industry. Environmental printing (or green printing) may seem against your best interest, but when you're hosting web-to-print or database publishing services for your customers, you are following this strategy anyway. So why not make use of it in your own marketing communication?

A marketing department usually spends a lot of effort defining the company's brand. The look and feel, the guidelines, the logos, and so on. But in too many cases, these rules are not followed by the franchise network or by local sales. Web2print applications or other tools built with the DMP FLO Suite can provide a solution for this.

You might have noticed that most of our marketing efforts are english-oriented. This is a deliberate choice. Rather than making a website once and translating it into the languages of our main markets, we chose to make a website once, and then keep adding interesting content to it for our customers and our prospects.

A lot has been said about cloud computing lately, and undoubtedly more will follow. For those of you who aren't familiar with it: cloud computing basically means hiring software services from the internet. Rather than buying licenses and (where needed) doing your custom development on that new environment, you rent these services from external servers. So what will this mean to printing companies over the next few years?

Surely, InDesign Server has made a huge impact on the web2print market over the past few years. Ours in not at all the only product with a large proportion of InDesign Server based features. But it's important to remember that it is not the only possibility for web2print applications.

In many cases, our web-to-print tools are configured to include some kind of stock orders. This can be very simple (user selects a PDF file which is configured as "in stock") or very complex (possibility for re-supply, automatic notifications, etc.). Usually they are static, but sometimes they include variable data (printed digitally on top of the stock).

Typically, database publishing of complex projects like catalogs have been the responsibility of internal, technical personnel. But with new technologies come new possibilities. Being able to generate a catalog in a matter of seconds means that end users (product managers, marketing people, ...) have much more freedom in this creation process. That's to say: they have less freedom in the design part (since that's all restricted by the company guidelines), but more freedom in the data.

As we're getting closer and closer to the realease of our 4.0 version, I'm getting more and more exited about some of the new features. One of the new features with the most potential surely is the link with Enfocus Switch. This software is well known for its unrivaled prepress automation functionalities. And now the power of the FLO Suite can be called from within the Switch workflows. And vice versa.

We're pleased to welcome both PositiveFocus and Tools4Media to our club. Both of them have signed distributor agreements with us last week.

We've been working on our frietjes-keyword for a couple of weeks, now, and we've succeeded in putting them on a 6th position in google. And I haven't even had the time to try to get some incoming links. So basically this confirms what I tell most of my customers: it's all about the content!

While digital asset management has been around for quite a few years, some of our customers and prospects still don't completely know how to go about providing the dam functionalities to their end customers. Surely it's better known than web2print or database publishing functionalities, but it's still a good idea to go over some basic steps in digital asset management projects.

The times when web-to-print solutions were limited to businesscards and letterheads are long gone. With the current technology, most print providers are able to offer these types of services. So the competitive edge of web-to-print has moved on. One of the battle fronts is the integration with existing product databases.

A neat trick in the DMP FLO Suite's InDesign templates is the use of layers in the template to make some parts of the template conditional. For an end user it is no more than checking a checkbox. But on the server-side, this will mean that the entire look and feel of the template can change.

Yes, I'm sorry, it's one of those. I'm going to talk about frietjes (french fries), and I really won't be saying all that much. As you may know, I'm going for top Google ranking on the frietjes-keyword. And my tactics won't be explained in this particular post. So please, get back to work and let me ramble on. Or even better: use the time you would have spent on reading this blog on telling a friend how good our software is.

The FLO Suite is primarily used in web based environments. Web-to-print applications, online database publishing, approval websites, and so on. But once the technology is theirs, a large amount of our customers also use it to automate their internal prepress workflows.

Depending on your preference, there are a lot of ways to start using web-to-print in the DMP FLO Suite. Most of our customers use the existing web2print possibilities, and configure them differently depending on the present needs. In many cases these and other customers also hire an integrator for specific projects. Something customized for either a single project (an end customer coming to the printing company with specific demands) or a "generic" application (the ideas of the printing company, resulting in their very own web-to-print solution to offer to all of their end customers). But a growing number of customers is also able to create their very own contentFLO interfaces from scratch. Let's see how they would do this for a simple web-to-print website.

When uploading InDesign Files to artworkFLO, all text and images can be edited from within you web browser. True online editing of InDesign Files.
But when the InDesign file consists of a large amount of pages, the online update-process can take quite a while.
When text is being edited, all pages containing the text-frame in which text is being edited, will have to be saved to PDF and converted to the viewer in your browser, so it might be worth the effort to modify the InDesign a little before uploading.

Our approach to database publishing has always been to adapt as much as possible to the needs of your particular workflow. This means that we often use InDesign Server. But for other database publishing workflows, this simply does not work. So we give you more tools. One of those is the use of PDF templates or PDF scripting.

In his blog of December 12, Joeri already talked a little about the next release of FLO version 4.0. Only one month away from the first public preview of our new version, I think it’s time to tell you a little more about the new features.

Not on our servers, that's for sure. We sell a license, not a hosted solution. But even if we did, the question would still stand: do you host your server inhouse, or do you go to a service provider? For many people contemplating the investment in a web-to-print or online database publishing application, this is not an easy question.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) has been around for a while. But a lot of people still seem to fail to understand the full potential of the technology. Let's give an overview of some of the uses.

If you are setting up a database publishing workflow, chances are that some type of translation needs to take place in it. A lot of options exist to incorporate this into your database publishing solution.

It has nothing to do with Adobe InDesign Server. It's completely irrelevant in almost all web2print tools we make. Database publishing hardly ever uses frietjes. So why am I going to talk about them? Because frietjes are relevant for content management.

If you're a printing company, then your business is printing. But more and more, peripheral services are becoming a necessity to attract new customers. Digital Asset Management was a forerunner in this regard. But Web-to-print and CMS/Content Management services are making progress as well.

In a previous post, I talked about some of the benefits of web-to-print and database publishing for supermarkets. Next to the POS materials, the weekly (or monthly) brochures are one of the biggest parts of this. I promised to go deeper into their advantages.

When you need to create various languages of an InDesign document, the best way is to create a file containing various layers, one for each language. A typical file will contain a number of layers containing the artwork, a layer with the base language and a number of language layers. FLO is an ideal solution to translate, correct and approve these translations, using the artworkFLO module. The only “problem” is, the time it takes to create the InDesign files for all individual languages. And when all translations are final, there is another challenge: merging the various language files back into 1 main file, containing a layer for each language. That’s why we’ve created this small utility: The FLOInDesign-layer Utility.

When you put a new web2print website online, the purposes usually are pretty clear: more prints with less work! Using InDesign Server and the underlying templates take care of part of the work. But of course you also want to be sure that you don't spend too much time on the administrative part of the orders. So linking the web-to-print website with your existing MIS solution is usually necessary.

When InDesign Server came out a couple of years ago, most of the immediate use was for database publishing and web-to-print tools. But more and more, InDesign Server is used in environments where templates really aren't an option. Creative publications, too many variations, and so on. The real power of InDesign Server for those cases lies in online corrections and approval.

Every time I talk with existing users of our DMP FLO Suite, it surprises me how little these customers use of the capabilities of FLO...

Once you've got a web-to-print application up and running, you will need to make sure that the end users keep using it. This may not be your responsibility as a printing company. But even then, you can guide the central marketing organization and provide them with tools.

When the target audience of your web-to-print application consists of consumers or a wide range of not necessarily known business partners, you don't have much options. Your web-to-print tools will need to show accurate prices online. This can be done in the application itself, or by linking to an MIS software. But if your web-to-print application is set up for a large account, there are many ways in which to incorporate pricing information.

There are many flavours of web-to-print. A web-to-print application that you are hosting for a retail bank might be completely different from a web-to-print application for a wholesale customer. And supermarkets, with their specific database publishing needs, are another case altogether.

If you are thinking about implementing a Web2Print application, there’s a lot of things to consider. While the DMP FLO Suite makes the implementation easier than ever before, there are still a lot of decisions to be made, which will affect the way you are going to set up your web to print solution. Web-to-Print applications come in many shapes and sizes, and this document can’t cover them all. But it will give you some food for thought.

In just a few years, InDesign Server has managed to completely dominate the market of web-to-print applications. Many vendors (including ourselves) use it as the main engine for variable database publishing.And that's not surprising, because there are a lot of advantages.

Quite often, web to print applications will contain types of output that are not actually generating prints. But as a provider of a web to print solution, your focus probably is on the "print" part. So what do you gain from the other types of output?

As a full-featured online publishing system, the chance you want to create publications using custom fonts is very likely. The chance you need to use fonts, not standard on a Windows Server is even more likely. Because FLO is a Windows Server-based publishing system, there are some things you might want to know...

Wholesale companies typically have a lot of database publishing needs. Regardless of their sector, the requirements and possible opportunities usually are the same.

A lot of our prospects and customers ask us how to market their web-to-print solutions. More specifically: what should they charge for it. There is no clear-cut best solution. It depends heavily of the audience of your web2print solutions. The following gives an overview of some of the possibilities for business to business web to print applications.

Happy New Year and all the best whishes to all of you!

A lot of the projects we've been doing for customers the past year revolve around existing prepress workflows. But rather than the traditional soft proofing solutions (much better than ours, and with lots of functionalities), our customers are often asking us to create very simple and intuitive applications.

A blog with only one author is not a real blog...

As a print provider thinking about hosting web2print solutions, one of your main target markets should definitely be branch organizations or retailers. These organizations have a lot of needs that can be fullfulled with web2print applications.

If you're in charge of a printing company, the definition for web to print can be pretty simple: "Online tools to fill my presses". But you should probably be aware that there are a lot of variations on web to print software. Because your customers don't really care about your presses. They have other concerns.

If you are going to offer web2print or database publishing solutions to your end customers, you will need some people in your company who can support (or even develop) these services. Similarly, you need to be aware that there is a different side to the web-to-print application: the side of the customer. What types of people are involved in the workflow of these tools?

XMP is the metadata format of Adobe. It has very good support in the Creative Suite products, and is supposed to be a widespread standard. We hope to find some use for it soon, since we're adding support for it into the new version of our digital asset management software.

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.

Yawah was recently purchased by Adobe. One of the immediate results of this was that eRez is no longer available as a license. It became part of the Scene7 products, which are only available as a paid service. Not good news for the DMP FLO Suite, but don't worry!

The holiday season usually isn't very busy for us. But this year, one of us had a brilliant idea. Let's come out with a real new version somewhere early next year. The result? This year we're not only eating too much, we're also working too much!