You’ve heard people say “seeing is believing.” It’s one of those catch phrases that’s been done to death, yet it’s exactly the right phrase to describe ProofHQ. So we’ll say it again, and this time with gusto; SEEING PROOFHQ IS BELIEVING.

So why are we on the mountain tops shouting our love for this solution? Because it’s just so obvious, so effective, and so simple.

It’s keeping online what was created there in the first place. Why do we still print and pass around paper layouts? Why do we still use ink and sticky notes? If you haven’t asked these “whys,” it’s probably because you’re too preoccupied with the deadline you missed when someone didn’t notice your stack of “to be approved” papers on their desk, and went on vacation.

ProofHQ is the answer; a smart, simple way to organize your proofing process by putting everything in one place, where everyone can access it, at anytime, from anywhere. It’s eliminating all that old-school printing-out-layouts/stuck-in-a-paper-jam stuff, and greasing the gears with digital lightning.

BUT EVEN BETTER; it’s a cinch to get up and running, and everyone onboard. Just hear what Ken Madsen, President, GSG has to say about ProofHQ.

You’re smart. You’ll see and you’ll believe. And when you do, we’ll help you go from “must get” to “got it” as quickly as you can say ProofHQ.

The holiday season is here and with it begins the cheerful trickling in of holiday cards. You might already have a pile forming on your entryway table.

 They’re a little like presents, you might say. Open them and inside is a photo of family and friends, or friends’ kids (my how they’ve grown!), who you haven’t seen in the longest of times. Or at the very least there’s a warm greeting with an update on “things.”

Yes, good old-fashioned paper holiday cards are perfect. But have you ever considered sending them online instead? You might have, but you didn’t ever actually do it because of a plethora of challenges we can all relate to:

 -Digital is impersonal, even if you slug in their names and your signature in a script-like font,
-People generally love the traditional acts of opening the mailbox, finding a card, and tearing open the envelope
-You can display paper cards as part of your holiday décor and look at them all season long
-None of your great aunts or grandmas have computers, and they keep great records of who they do and don’t get cards from

So maybe it’s easier to just send paper cards. Fair enough. 

Now (seemingly unrelated, but you’ll see how they are shortly), when you think of your approval process at work, you think of paper too, right? Have you ever considered moving it all online instead? You might have, but you didn’t ever actually do it because of a plethora of challenges we can all relate to:

-Digital, you are told, is impersonal because hand writing comments in red ink makes people feel like everyone’s actually “touched” the project (kumbaya)
-People generally feel safe with the traditional act of moving stacks of paper from desk to desk (what if there’s a computer glitch?!)
-You can’t get anyone to understand that all season long, you’re spending more on reams of paper than you would on this one solution
-None of the higher-ups do well with change, and this would jingle bell rock their worlds in a very bad way (and don’t think they’re not keeping record of that for review time)

So maybe it’s easier to just leave things the way they are. Sure is. But then it’ll be another year of miscommunications, blown budgets and deadlines…and we both know that’s not really what you want.

TO SAY a digital proofing and approval process is more streamlined, efficient and eliminates multiple rounds of back and forth IS EASY. To get everyone on board with this change takes more than a little holiday magic.

Look. You’ve done your research. You know there are better options out there. With the New Year swiftly approaching, now is the time to make the switch. Start clean and fresh…and paper free!

To make everyone happy, you can even send a paper card to make the announcement.

MAKE A RESOLUTION TO DITCH YOUR PAPER APPROVAL PROCESS!

Friends,

As a member of NAPC's customer-focused, technology-taming Customer Support team I passionately advocate and support our customer's [your] investment in Dalim Software's industry-leading solutions TWiST, DiALOGUE and ES.

Today, I'd like to share with you and perhaps get you thinking about customer-facing 'branding' opportunities within ES.

I would imagine that many of you ES administrators have already achieved some 'branding' knowingly or un-knowingly when you used the Customization-Theme Configuration feature to add your organization's logo to the Login Screen?

How about applying your own colors to the ES interface? Sure you have. Since you [may] have created a custom look and feel for your ES users and customers, why not consider applying your custom theme to some new, branded e-Mail templates!

Your ES 3 installation came with (8) e-Mail templates and (11) default Notification templates. For this exercise and introduction, we'll choose the File Event condition as our E-Mail template source and create a new template by modifying it.

First things first.

You don't have to be a programmer or .html wiz to edit the templates, so please, keep reading. If you are a wiz, consider sharing what you've learned with a coworker and helping them along. Regardless, everything you will need can be found in tools you use everyday and the 'know-how', trust me, you already have it.

Ready?

Let's start by identifying some 'parts' you will be adding to the template to achieve some enhancement. Color. You'll need to determine the hexidecimal value of the color you will be applying [ex:#bf2e1a] and a raster version of your logo. Your art or logo file should be in [.png, .gif .jpg] format using the RGB colorspace. Indexed or Greyscale colorspaces will also work.

Login to ES as an Administrator. Select "Administration" mode and then navigate to and open the File Event E-Mail template. In the message body, Select All and Copy to capture the entire message body. Launch your text-editing application and Paste the message body into a blank document. It's a good idea to perform Save As... "File Event" so you have a backup of the E-Mail template [for safekeeping].

In the message body, Find and Replace "#252525" with your color. Find and Replace "header.png" with the exact name of your logo [ex: my_logo.png]. So far so good? Now perform a Select All, Copy.

Switching back to ES...the File Event E-Mail template...

Click in the message body area and Paste your edited message body into the template. Click OK to close the template editor window, and then click Save to update your File Event template.

That's it, the editing is done.

On your ES 3 server, navigate to the "images" directory:

/symlnks/common/tomcat6.0/webapps/Esprit/images

Copy your logo into the "images" directory. [EOF]

Returning to ES, perform an action in ES that will trigger a File Event Notification condition, and check your E-Mail. There is your newly 'branded' E-Mail message!

Okay, before you get too excited (and waste alot of time designing a masterpiece) allow me to make an important point: ES 3 E-Mail templates must be under 2048 bytes. Yes, that's bytes. To put that number into perspective, this blog message would have ended six sentences ago at the [EOF] marker!

So friends, take care to keep your customization simple. And for you 'clever', self-reliant users who have jumped to the conclusion of overcoming the 2048 hurdle, let me be perfectly clear: I do not advocate 'hacking', so don't even go there...

The upside is, you can get some attractive results and stay under the 2048 limit with a bit of trial and error. So keep at it. I am confident that you'll be successful in adding a little style to your messages, even with the size restriction.

Now, the good news is, we all can also look forward to a better branded future in ES. That's right, the engineers at Dalim Software are aware of [yours, mine and] the marketplace's desire to design and compose attractive, branded E-Mail messages and have taken action to relax the size restriction in the next "dot-oh" release of ES...ES 4.0.

Stay tuned, my friends.

Scott

We're a bunch of performance geeks here. We've been tweaking blocksizes, stripe, and interleave settings on disk since SGI first gave you access to 'em. Tuning and re-tuning SWAP size, location, type is in our blood. A few percentage points here, double digit gains there, all without more capex. Gotta love it.

Now, anytime a paradigm shift in technology comes out there's a steep cost differential to it, right? 10Gb networking had only a tiny little blip of time when it was out of reach of the masses, which is a refreshing change. You can kit out most servers with a card, an acceptable managed switch with a 10Gb port or two, for a very reasonably cost.

Why go to 10? Our desktops have had Gb cards for what seems like forever, and very fast CPUs. With just a couple 'power' users you could swamp the networking capabilities of a server. Of course, a handful of years ago disks could only cough up 150Mb/sec or so of sustained data, so network tended to not be the gating factor in server  performance. Modern disk starts at well over 300Mb/sec, and if you stripe or otherwise use some common sense design principles you can achieve multiples of that.

 Xinet and NAPC both use the 1 to 6 rule for users and performance: with 6 retouchers (or 'power' users), you can assume 1 of them will be accessing the server at one time. 12=2, 18=3. It's a rough rule of thumb, but one that seems to stand up over time. 12 heavy hitters can thus drain 120Mb/sec out of a server, which is the better part of 2 1Gb cards bonded together. Add in the other users, doing layout, OPI printing (yep, some folks still use an OPI workflow), and Portal access, you've got a saturated pipe. 10gb gives you a good 800mb/sec of access speed, which will sate all but the most demanding organizations needs for data.

Next of course, we can talk about teaming 10Gb interfaces! (insert evil chortle of delight here).