The term workflow used to just mean the prepress area, but today workflow has been implemented from the customers’ creative and business systems through the total prepress, press and postpress production processes, through to logistics up to receipt of the printed product by the client. In addition workflow reaches into the internet delivery world to link up printing and electronic forms of information delivery.
All the major suppliers offer very sophisticated workflows that cover elements of the total workflow process. The use of JDF has allowed workflows for different parts of the overall process to work together to create relatively complete cohesive workflows. One of the leading workflow suppliers is Agfa with its Apogee solutions. Agfa has appeared to often be a step ahead of the other suppliers in implementing new functionality into workflow. It was to my recollection the first major supplier to offer a PDF workflow, and with its Delarno systems (now called Portal), one of the first suppliers to offer a fully managed workflow outside of just prepress.
One of the most interesting new developments in workflow at drupa last year, and one of the least commented upon, was the Apogee Media system. This was the first time I had seen a content management and editorial creative solution as a part of the overall workflow from a major single source supplier. I wondered exactly what type of customers this system was aimed at. Apogee Media is a full internet based editorial solution usiing Adobe InDesign CS4 with a digital asset management system. The basic system for this was sourced by Agfa from Spanish supplier Seinet, and uses elements of the well established Seinet Xtent integrated publishing solution developed in Java (J2EE) and XML. This integrates with the Adobe InDesign platform to provide multi-user creative design and flexible page layout tools. The concept of Apogee Media is to provide the link between print buyers such as advertising agencies, corporations, brand owners and publishers with print producers.
I was interested to find how Agfa was doing with Apogee Media, as it appears to be aimed at a different type of customer to the normal Apogee users. Apogee Prepress is one of the most successful workflow products in the industry, and I am advised that there are around 7,500 worldwide installations. Apogee Portal (Delarno) has more than 300 installations, and Apogee Media has 30 installations worldwide with around 300 seats. It appears however that these 30 Apogee Media installations are new users and are not existing Apogee Prepress users.
Agfa is targeting a new market area and is entering a new competitive landscape and is looking to move upstream to where content is created. In this they are taking on many of the existing content management suppliers and in particular companies like Woodwind, K4 and Atex and Agfa is aiming at the custom magazine publishers in the B2B and corporate magazine areas. It differentiates itself from these other suppliers by the scale of the Agfa business with its worldwide operations, and its links with the production areas of the market. In fact in workflow for magazines Agfa has had great success. In the UK for example many of the major magazine printers including St Ives, Wyndenham Heron and Garnett Dickinson are major users of full Apogee workflows with fully automated operations.
The following publishers are among the first Apogee Media users. Decom in Belgium, AGI in Sweden and Watt in the USA. Watt is running the ProImage MediaWay product that is Apogee Media under the ProImage name.
Decom in Belgium has a 40 user installation and has just announced that through their use of Apogee Media they have managed to shorten production times and further simplify the communication chain with their customers. Roger de Laet, CEO of Decom stated, “Apogee Media offers our clients a powerful but user-friendly online editorial workspace that is transparent, open and future-oriented. An integrated environment in line with our clients’ publications.” Erick Meyers, Marketing Communications Editor at Management Centre Europe, the European headquarters of the American Management Association (AMA), one of Decom’s clients stated, “this is definitely the best service we’ve seen for years. Apogee Media allows us to monitor our publication through a web browser from anywhere in the world. We’re even able to change text in the original InDesign files, which is a huge advantage over PDF post-it corrections.”
Agfa’s move into this new market is a very significant change in its business model. It has chosen to partner with Seinet, a leader in advanced Internet based content management solutions, to develop a modern solution that extends Apogee into a new and potential large new market area. While it is aiming predominantly at magazine publishers, I see that Apogee Media could have major benefits for printers with Apogee Prepress and Portal, wanting to extend their businesses into new value added areas. Many small magazine and newspaper publishers don’t have advanced content management systems, so magazine or even newspaper printers could use Apogee Media to provide added services to their customers. This is a significant directional change for Agfa in these difficult times.
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