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.