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FRONT PAGE

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 .

 


Process [Click for Larger Image]

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. The everydayoffice servers sends the image and template information to JGenerator which produces a flash preview based upon the user input.
  4. The Enhydra generated interface, with Macromedia Flash, displays the generated Flash movie for soft proofing and confirmation. Cost is calculated, displayed, and approved.
  5. 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)
  6. 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.
 

Conclusion

The combination of advanced technology and affordable costs made available by Open Source Software, everydayoffice has accomplished the goal of creating a cost-effective On-Demand Print System. This will allow companies both large and small to realize a better Return On Investment for the Direct Marketing activities. The success of our efforts were greatly enhanced by the Enhydra Application Server.

 

 
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