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On-Line Print-on-Demands System
Joseph Franklyn McElroy, CEO, EveryDayOffice
Jonathan Achai, Lead Designer, EveryDayOffice

Companies spend 5% of their revenue on printed
materials to support sales, operations, marketing and administration.
In order to obtain the lowest cost per piece, companies are encouraged
to produce larger quantities. Subsequently, printed documents are stored,
managed, distributed, and destroyed at enormous costs to the organization.
Studies conducted by Xerox and the Rochester Institute of Technology show
that printing accounts for only 25% of a document’ s total costs and that
almost 40% of everything printed becomes obsolete before it is ever used.
On-demand printing systems enable organizations
to manage electronic documents instead of paper documents, and then produce
the exact quantity of hard documents whenever they are needed. Even though
producing materials on-demand in smaller quantities means higher production
costs, on-demand systems are more resource efficient and cost-effective
than traditional document management systems because they eliminate storage
and disposal costs. Furthermore, on-demand systems enable organizations
to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace and to update materials
frequently.
To facilitate order entry, most print-on-demand
customers use “collateral catalogs” to select the item they need and then
fax their orders to a print buyer who aggregates orders from multiple
end-users. The print buyer coordinates production and delivery to the
end-user. Some companies have implemented on-line on-demand systems, but
when the costs and time required to develop such custom systems are amortized
over the print volume, these custom systems are inefficient.
The goal of everydayoffice's On-Demand
Print Wizard is to make customized on-demand print services affordable,
quickly implementable, and entirely scalable.
Accomplishment
The everydayoffice On-Demand Print
Wizard is a system that makes printing localized and tailored marketing
materials a breeze. The Printing Wizard uses, just as all of everydayoffice's
applications, totally Open Source software. It combines the J-Generator,
an open source alternative to Macromedia's Generator that creates Flash
movies from templates and variables, and the Enhydra Application Server
from Lutris Technologies, which generates the presentation object that
provides the user interface to the printing wizard. The Enhydra business
layer of the application interacts with J-Generator to create a Flash
movie that acts as the Printing Wizard preview. By utilizing the technologies
of the Enhydra, and J-Generator, everydayoffice has created
an easy to use interface to create print jobs over the web, with the ability
to preview the postcards, brochures or any other printed mail marketing
tools.
everydayoffice chose Enhydra as
it is highly regarded as the best Open Source Java application server;
it is stable and always improving. Because Enhydra is so widely used,
there is a large support base of users and developers available making
every problem or challenge easy to overcome. In addition, Enhydra's three
layer model provides an effective way to separate the tasks of developing
applications, which aids developers and designers by splitting functionality
and minimizing the impact on the application when a decision is made to
switch databases, file formats or URL layouts .
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Process [Click for Larger Image]

- Using Enhydra generated interfaces, data, such
as marketing phrases, fonts, pictures, mailing list, etc, is collected
from the user and submitted to the everydayoffice servers
where it is validated.
- The everydayoffice servers store
the information in a PostgreSQL database. Each Customer gets their own
database, using a distributed access method. This allows data to be
stored in local servers at the Customer site if desired.
- The everydayoffice servers sends
the image and template information to JGenerator which produces a flash
preview based upon the user input.
- The Enhydra generated interface, with Macromedia
Flash, displays the generated Flash movie for soft proofing and confirmation.
Cost is calculated, displayed, and approved.
- After confirmation the relevant data is either
stored in folders on the everydayoffice servers, accessable via a customer
service application (also Enhydra based) designed for the printer, or
it is sent via FTP to the print shop. The relevant data includes the
print object (EPS file), variable input (gifs, jpgs, fonts, etc) and
the desired (optional) mailing list(s)
- The print shop manufactures the specified number
of print materials and sends them, either via mail to receipients specified
in mailing lists or shipped in bulk to customer.
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