Carried out by the Printing Industry of America Centre for Technology and Research, the Technique MIS was tested against the latest version of the MIS to Prepress Interoperability Conformance Specifications.

This ensures the MIS is compatible with the latest technology via JDF with other compliant vendor's systems.

Technique's US chief executive officer Mark Anderson said: "Although we have demonstrated JDF integration with preferred vendors for a long time, people are still a bit hesitant if they don't see the stamp... Being certified gives buyers and users of other systems the comfort that we can integrate with their system as long as it is also certified."

However, he said the certification only covers the basic communication and basic check of JDF conformance.

"Prepress preparation is a good example where the certification gets you the basics, but a useful implementation contains detail," he explained. "For example, when we integrate with Apogee products we can dynamically build a task chain with any combination of prepress operations. These are based on what you actually specified in the estimate or order. Many other systems just supply the absolute basic or a hard-coded set."