Storefront 7.0

Pageflex, a division of Bitstream Inc. and a leading developer of enterprise variable data publishing and web-to-print solutions, announced today the release of Pageflex Storefront 7.0, which now incorporates the graphic design industry-standard Adobe InDesign CS4 Server and offers sophisticated customization of graphically-rich documents through a Web browser. This latest release of Pageflex’s award-winning Web-to-print offering is especially welcome to customers that have elaborate graphic design needs and large volumes of existing Adobe InDesign documents. Pageflex Storefront 7.0 is part of a larger release of Pageflex 7.0, the enterprise solution that also includes Pageflex Server and Pageflex Campaign Manager, and which offers customers feature enhancements across this product range.

“This release fundamentally moves Pageflex Storefront from being a printer-centric Web-to-print product to being a brand management solution for corporate marketers, whether they use it internally, through their print service provider, or through an advertising agency. By supporting variable Pageflex documents, InDesign documents, Adobe PDF documents, and HTML emails, Pageflex Storefront becomes a media center that is accessible from anywhere, supports a wide range of document customization needs, and enables cost-saving automated workflows,” says Anna Chagnon, Bitstream President and CEO. “Our strong partnership with Adobe has been critical to opening our product line up to support a wider range of document formats and community of users.”

With this major release, companies that have standardized on Adobe InDesign now have the opportunity to better manage their processes for personalizing and versioning marketing materials. Pageflex Storefront provides marketers, corporations, franchise organizations, and print service providers with an easy, flexible and scalable solution for creating an online site to manage personalized and customized documents. Users can easily configure Pageflex Storefront to automate many critical steps in the Web-to-Print workflow and eliminate bottlenecks in the traditional document production process. The addition of support for Adobe InDesign documents expands the gamut of graphic design styles that can be produced.

“We are delighted that Bitstream has chosen to make Adobe InDesign Server available to their Pageflex Storefront customers, giving them the ability to manage, customize, and order even the most graphically rich of documents from within Pageflex Storefront,” says Chris Kitchener, product manager for Adobe InDesign Server. “Companies that implement Pageflex Storefront with InDesign Server will have the ability to develop powerful business automation workflows that both protect their brands and maintain the sophisticated creative designs that designers achieve daily with Adobe InDesign.”

Automating Workflows
“Pageflex Storefront 7.0 is all about giving our customers more options for managing their document workflows. Customers can choose to use our existing powerful document composition engine, called Pageflex NuDoc, or use Adobe InDesign Server. To help differentiate the options our customers now have, we’re bringing back the NuDoc name to describe the powerful document customization engine that we’ve developed here at Bitstream over the past twelve years,” says Chagnon. “We will work with customers to understand which composition server best meets their business needs. We anticipate that some customers will actually find it advantageous to run both servers with template designs in each format intermixed within their storefront.”

Pageflex has used its expertise in variable data composition to enhance Adobe InDesign. Concurrent with the release of Pageflex Storefront 7.0, the company has also released Pageflex Studio ID, a desktop variable data publishing (VDP) plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS4. Adobe InDesign templates are designed and configured in Pageflex Studio ID on a Windows or Macintosh computer, packaged, and uploaded to Pageflex Storefront. There is no conversion to a Pageflex format. The templates retain all of the design and variable richness they have in Pageflex Studio ID.