Like nearly every other industry, the Print and Marketing Services community is not immune to the economic woes the world is facing. As I type, the Boston Globe is struggling to repel Bankruptcy. The Rocky Mountain News had to call it quits just a few weeks ago. Some of the biggest print shops around have gone extinct. I doubt any of this is news to you and I'm certain you're tired of hearing and reading about it.

Despite this downturn, it remains a bittersweet time for those looking to survive. Companies are using innovative technology to help battle the inevitable. I especially see this in the Variable Data, Personalized Publishing, Dynamic Page Publishing, Web-To-Print world! Targeted marketing, while not a new term, is certainly one that is prevalent in order that printers and marketers aren't sending out large quantities of print to just anybody, but rather to the audience that the message is appropriate for. If John Doe doesn't have a cat, I don't want to be sending him coupons for cat food - thus wasting his time as well as precious resources. But if John Doe does like dogs, sending him a coupon for dog food is more likely to gain his attention.

VDP has been near and dear to me for over 10 years and it's an exciting time to see company's swarm to the technology. For myself, it's a busy era not only because NAPC offers the Pageflex product line, but also because we have so many initiatives surrounding it.

Pageflex themselves are looking to release version 7 of their powerful software that will allow users to use Adobe InDesign to create documents that can be posted on Storefront. One would also be able to utilize the InDesign server to serve up these templates. Version seven will offer other features and enhancements that help maintain Pageflexs' best-in-breed status.

NAPC is starting to implement the Pageflex-to-Xinet Connector at beta sites. The Connector allows Storefront users the ability to retrieve a live asset from the Xinet Digital Asset Management system and place it right in the template they are customizing.

Campaign Manager is growing in popularity as well. The ability to send out email and print campaigns and track them is paramount to marketing agencies and printers alike. Yet another service they can offer their clients.

We have other initiatives - too many to mention - that assure we are not sitting still while the economy tries to recover but instead, working to make the technology help us through these times.

Incidentally, if you're interested to see what the Pageflex and Connector products can do, I invite you to take a look at a video we posted recently (yet another initiative) - go to http://www.napc.com/pageflex.php# and click in the lower-right part of the page - and then contact NAPC to get more details.

It's a bittersweet time!

As most would have expected, the attendance at the OnDemand show in Philadelphia was down from previous years. One report was that "registrations" were up 18% from last year, but that is not reflected in the actual attendees. Still, there a very steady stream of people running through the show.

Front and center for NAPC, of course, was our reception for the Pageflex-to-Xinet Connector which went well. Many vendors and customers alike, attended the event. I think there was about 25 attendees and certainly a lot of interest in the product. The product was wall represented in the media as well (What They Think, Seybold, and many others). The wait is finally over for those looking to connect to Xinet DAM systems from Storefront. I was approached by several folks to get more information on this.

Pageflex was showcasing their Adobe InDesign Studio plug-in which is wrapped up in their anticpated version 7 release of Pageflex software. There were a couple perspectives on this depending on exactly what it is you're looking for so clearly there is a lot of development decisions still to be made. The InDesign Studio plug-in shows up as a palate in InDesign 4 which offers the familiar PF Studio functions (variables, job setups, etc.). You can then package this InDesign job and deploy it on Storefront just as you would a Studio job. The unclear portion was where InDesign Server would come into play. The plug-in will allow for Mac users to work with Pageflex but realize that if Storefront is the posting portal, fonts may still have to be dealt with. Still, it made great strides towards what customers are looking for.

Pageflex was also showing their charting plug-in. This is a pretty feature rich product put out by their services group and addresses needs for dynamic charting in the Pagflex world. Kudo's to Pageflex for taking home another "Best in Show" award for the Storefront 7 product.

Of course there were many other web-to-print offerings including XMPie's uStore, RedTie, OPS, and others. UK company RedTie was pretty aggressive with their product but the product is limited to web-to-print - no email, purls, or campaign managing.

Online Print Solutions (australia company) had a steady stream of folks running through their booth. Their solution is well structured but I believe that's also reflected in the high price.

I overheard two separate conversations that Printable was going under. Who knows if that was a competitor trying to start a bad rumor or what the truth was. I think they would be quickly snatched up by someone else (XMPie/Xerox, etc.).

I sat in on a session at EFI for their new Command Workstation release. Their past releases have concentrated around VDP but this version, not so much.

I attended a session titled "What to do when your W2P application grows up: Using CMS & DAM to manage complex assets" presented by Jeffrey Stewart of Trekk Cross-media. This session was at the end of the day and to get an idea of how thinning the crowd was, there were nine (9) people in attendance to this session - four of which looked to be Trekk employees. I don't think it was a bad session - just people leaving town! Regardless, the session was well done and Jeff brought up NAPC's Connector announcement and commended NAPC on the efforts. It's this type of product that he believes people need to solidify their deployments. Jeff talked about how the integration with CMS and DAM systems is crucial for a variety of reason including versioning of assets, archiving, back-up, organization, and more. He showed some samples of the work that they did including some for a casino, a financial institution, a pharmacutial company, Adobe, and a retail sign company. They used to work with Pageflex but concentrate mainly with XMPie now. I talked to him after the presentation and he said he drifted away from Pageflex because Trekk needed features that were only available in InDesign.

The final day of the show pretty much represents a ghost-town. Typical end-of-show with sparse attendance and people snatching up the freebies and slick posters.