Heidelberg’s (Booth 1214) new digital storefront, Web-to-Print Manager brings actual print production engines to the Web-to-print and storefront environment for the first time. The Web-to-print solution is a comprehensive set of online tools designed to make it easy for a print provider to offer its customers a simple, yet powerful method of uploading new files or manipulating existing files for digital or offset printing. Options include email campaign management, variable data support, document customization and brand management via highly customizable e-commerce portals.
The Web-to-Print Manager is tightly integrated with the complete Prinect production workflow, offering features not found in other Web-to-print solutions. While preflighting is conventionally done mid-stream in the production workflow, often by the prepress operators, Prinect Web-to-Print Manager takes advantage of Heidelberg’s powerful Prinect Preflight preflight engine, a standard feature of Heidelberg's Prinect workflow. As a result, print buyers immediately see that their file has achieved the print provider’s preflight criteria—ensuring that their file will flow through production smoothly.
PDF proofs are the industry standard and now, when a print buyer chooses a PDF proof in the Prinect Web-to-Print Manager, he encounters another industry leading feature: the PDF proof generated for the print buyer is rendered by the Prinect Renderer—the same engine that will generate printing plates and hard proofs in production. This architecture assures that what the print buyer sees and approves is exactly what will output to the pressroom.
Prinect Web-to-Print Manager offers a third industry first for Web-to-print for print shops that want to perform job “ganging” for production efficiencies. The embedded Prinect Gang Form Manager helps production operators group similar jobs logically (according to due date, stock, colors, etc.) for the best utilization of all production equipment. The result? Production efficiency that has an immediate, positive impact on the printer’s overall profitability.
Heidelberg will offer the Prinect Web-to-Print Manager both as a license model—hosted locally by the print provider—and as a Software-as-a-Service, offering remote hosting options.