Before the Internet, you saw a doctor for a virus, used worms for fishing, and got all your mail from the postal service. My, how times have changed. The Internet has affected us in more ways than anyone could have imagined 10 or 15 years ago. Search engines can dig up the most obscure facts. Correspondence can be sent and received instantaneously. News, weather forecasts, entertainment tidbits, and sports scores are literally at our fingertips. For our industry, probably the most important changes brought on by the Internet are electronic customer interfaces and remote file transfer.

I doubt there are many printshops that don’t have a website or email address. Granted, there are many levels of sophistication involved. Sometimes the website amounts to little more than an electronic Yellow Pages ad and there are still some shops with Yahoo email addresses. However, successful shops have moved beyond such rudimentary Internet offerings.

Static websites have evolved into interactive “digital storefronts” that link the printer to the customer.

According to an Océ white paper: “A digital storefront bridges the substantial gap between older ways of digital file submission and state-of-the-art procedures that dramatically enhance submitting new documents for printing while facilitating reprinting of existing jobs. It goes far beyond unreliable methods of such as email or outdated ones such as physical delivery of jobs on Zip disks, or CD-ROMs, while providing measurable value for document creators and print providers.”

According to Océ, such setups:

• Help a printshop better integrate into client’s supply chains.
• Make it easy for customers to submit jobs.
• Reduce transaction costs by eliminating manual steps.
• Reduce errors and miscommunication.
• Streamline proofing and approval cycles.
• Help integrate job status information with print MIS tools.
• Facilitate value-added print services such as versioning or personalization.

That’s not to say that all print jobs are now moving seamlessly from customer to printer. A recent PrintImage study found that while 65 percent of four-color job files are customer-created, fully 78 percent need some kind of manipulation by the DTP department. An average of 58 minutes was needed to correct the digital file but, oddly, only 71 percent of printers charged for that time.

One of the driving forces behind moving more and more jobs to the Internet has been the evolution of PDF. While not perfect, PDF has helped tame some problems with native application files. Another PrintImage survey found that “those companies which rank at the top in terms of productivity place a significantly greater emphasis on PDF workflow than do either the average or those at the bottom.”

A Few Players
While printers can build their own interactive websites, many have turned to what might be called pre-fab packages. Obviously, there are many, many Internet tools and solutions for printers, but here, according to our digital guru John Giles, are some of the more popular offerings in our industry segment.

EFI’s PrintSmith has an optional feature called PrintSmith Site, which links with the PrintSmith management software. It offers either a custom-configured website hosted by EFI or integrates with the design and navigation of the existing site. At Print 05, EFI announced PrinterSite Foundation which it billed as giving printers “robust web-to-print functionality.” However, this new job submission function is only available as standard on EFI’s higher-end MIS packages, Hagen Logic and PSI. EFI also announced the new Executive Information System, a Web-based “command center” and interactive analysis tool for its Hagen, Logic, and PSI MIS systems. For now it is not available for PrintSmith. (www.efi.com)