“We were involved in earlier template-based products and we think this is the most intuitive and up-to-date system on the market today,” says Mike Parmenter, general manager for print at Adstream. “It is an online service for managing brand materials, aimed at corporates who outsource print, or printers who want to create templates for customers. Once set up, you don’t need to use Quark XPress or InDesign, and there’s no knowledge of either needed to run it. It’s very easy to use and handles the complete print process from end to end. It can be operated by brand owners, designers or printers.”

Adstream is a new name in print, but readers may be more familiar with Quickcut, which Adstream acquired at the end of March. Quickcut’s product suite is widely used by newspapers and advertisers for customer-end ad creation, delivery and tracking.

New beginnings
Like Quickcut, Adstream started out in Australia developing delivery technology for digital ads, though Adstream’s speciality is in the transmission, tracking and asset management of large digital TV ads.
With the takeover came a relocation of the headquarters from Sydney to London. Andy Hopkinson is managing director of Adstream UK. “Adstream is the company and Quickcut is now the brand name for print-related products,” he explains.

The new E-ssential product has been developed out of Quickcut’s experience with its QuickPrint module, which allows publishers and printers to post downloadable layout templates online. The templates can be set up for any of the popular layout programs – InDesign, Illustrator, XPress. They are downloaded and run on the designer’s own computers.

Ad agencies use them to create ads that are constrained to the appropriate sizes and colour sets. The system runs a pre-flight validation before it will allow job files to be uploaded to the Quickcut hosted servers.

E-ssential grew out of a customer requirement, says Parmenter. “We created a very early web-to-print system for a customer who wanted to create classified ads. Initially, there was a fear factor over loss of control and interaction with the customer, plus a potential loss of business from corrections carried out by the printer. But the customers liked the 24/7 aspect of creating their own ads and previewing them.”

Standard web browser
Unlike the customer-end local layout of Quickcut, E-ssential operates completely online, accessing a hosted layout system through a completely standard web browser. It doesn’t use special plug-ins, though it does require the presence of the free Flash plug-in which, being the most common plug-in worldwide, most users will have already.

“There are systems with more capability than ours, but they are complicated to set up,” says Mike Brothers, Adstream’s director of print management. “When we show our product, we stress that it’s easier to set up and use, with no need for (special) plug-ins, you just go. Customers like to control their assets and source materials themselves.”

A customer logs into an E-ssential site through a web browser, using names and passwords supplied by the service provider. Once logged in, a new Flash-driven window is launched, containing tools and file management menus. The window’s interface can be branded with the printer’s own identity, or tailored for individual customers, departments or brands.

On-screen operations are very fast, because all the images are delivered at low resolution. When the document is completed, E-ssential builds a print-ready PDF output document in full resolution.

The layout window contains tools for selecting objects, zooming and scrolling, adding or hiding guides, creating and editing text, selecting fonts, alignments, styles and sizes, adding and scaling images and tables and changing colours. All of these can be constrained or deactivated by the template. The user can see all the areas that can be edited by clicking a “show all” button. This puts coloured boxes around any elements that can be edited. Anything not highlighted is fixed by the template.

Images are uploaded to a online asset store, which automatically generates the low-res version. The high-res component is used to create the final print-ready PDF and can be left in the asset manager to form a permanent asset for sharing.

It’s also possible to do mail-merges or links to lists and databases for direct mail and other variable-data jobs.

Uncompleted jobs can be saved and retrieved for later completion. Job lists can be called up and viewed by status, such as work-in-progress, awaiting approval, and completed. You can preview the placement of the first and last names in a list.

When you save your job, the system can then run an approvals process before it is released to print. This can include collaborative viewing and annotations by several people, with provision for colour-coding to identify them.

A job ticket or ad booking reference can be attached to the final PDF, though at present this is not JDF. Brothers says that links to third-party MIS will be also offered. E-ssential will work with international languages and character sets.

Ongoing improvements
Although now an announced product with a handful of live user sites, E-ssential is still in development, says Brothers. Planned future features include colour management for RGB or CMYK colour sets and links to third-party digital asset management software. A 3D soft preview option is planned, perhaps with a virtual shelf or billboard backdrop.

There will also be an “offline” version of E-ssential that can run independently. The idea is that sales staff can load it onto laptop computers and take it directly to customers, where the job can be made up on-screen and shown for approval. When the sales person returns to base and plugs the laptop into the Internet, it synchronises with the E-ssential base system, uploads the job and downloads any updates that may have occurred since its last synchronisation.

Initially Adstream will set up templates for customers. “In future, we will supply printers with a template creation tool so they can set up their own. That’s a priority development,” Brothers says. “It won’t need any programming skills, you’ll import a PDF for use as a template, then identify variable elements that then become editable fields in the template. You then define constraints for what can be edited.”

The charging method for E-ssential will be a yearly licence of £5,000 plus a transaction charge based on job documents or ad files submitted. “There will also be an initial charge to develop templates and ‘skins’ to brand the site – perhaps another £2,000 to £10,000 depending on the quantity,” says Brothers.

“At the time of the dotcom crash, only technically savvy people used the computers,” adds Parmenter. “Now everyone uses them. Customers like the immediacy, on-demand aspects, on their desktops. Now that publishing technology has settled down, the fear factor is wearing off. Today online web-to-print is accepted and customers are asking for it.”

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SPECIFICATIONS
Price £5,000 pa plus transaction charges
Contact Adstream UK 020 7539 8400 www.adstream.com

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THE ALTERNATIVES
ROI Distribution Xralle
Xralle is a scalable product for web-to-print procurement and management. The secure system can handle ordering, document creation, purchasing and on-line transactions and print management. It runs on the user’s own server, so it isn’t hosted by ROI. It incorporates Pageflex .EDIT software for interactive document creation via templates, customer access through web browsers and a back-end XPC (Xralle PDF Creator) to generate print-ready files with JDF job tickets.
Price n/s
Contact ROI 0845 602 3558 www.roidistribution.com

Kodak Web-to-Unified Print
Kodak’s Web-to-Unified Print Software was announced in late August and is expected to ship in Q2 2007. It is being developed as an extension of existing Kodak-Creo products: the InSite web portal which runs on the user’s own server; EyeMedia digital asset management; and Prinergy workflow.
Price TBA
Contact Kodak Graphic Communications 01923 233366 www.kodak.com

Press-sense iWay
iWay Prime is a complete package for online document creation, ordering and workflow. Press-sense offers direct links to Xerox Freeflow and Océ Prisma front ends for digital presses, but it can be used with any production system.
Price n/s
Contact NCS 01661 803040 www.ncs-plc.co.uk www.ncs-plc.co.uk