I have been designing and implementing production workflows since the beginning of process digitization in the late 1980s. Although back then it was more centered around proprietary solutions, when the mainstream adoption of PDF as the de facto exchange format started to take hold in the mid 1990s, unique workflow solution tools started to emerge that could provide process automation in an increasingly disparate and agnostic production environment. 

One of the first solutions introduced to meet those requirements was introduced exactly 20 years ago in March of 2000. That solution was Enfocus Pitstop Server, a standalone agnostic hot folder-based preflight automation application. At the time of its release, PitStop Pro 4.05, a “mostly” manual editing application hosted within Adobe Acrobat had already garnered an important role in many prepress departments, but “Server” brought PDF checking and editing to a whole new level. Server uses PitStop “profiles” to check/fix and “actions” to edit PDF files based on rules, automatically, through a “hot folder” process. Over the years, as new PitStop Pro profile and action tools were introduced, they were also available for use in Server, so it has become even more powerful over time. Fast forward to today, 20 years later, and the landscape has changed quite a bit. Automation is no longer a unique idea; it is a requirement of today’s business and production processes. 

Around the same time as the release of PitStop Server, CaslonSoft was founded in Denmark, which developed CaslonFlow, an automation platform which is now known after a few acquisitions as Enfocus Switch. Switch is an agnostic rule-based pipeline automation workflow platform that has become the model for many other workflow system designs. Now Enfocus has decided that with the introduction of PitStop Server 2020, all current PitStop Server customers with an active maintenance contract will be entitled to receive a Switch Core 2020 license when it releases in June. This will bring rule-based pipeline workflows to PitStop Server, a significant upgrade from hot folders. It also adds many (but not all) of the Switch functions, including browser-based job tracking and overview, automatic file receiving via FTP and email, file sorting, naming and archiving based on document variables, amongst many other features. It also provides access to the Enfocus Appstore where many unique third-party workflow tools are available for free or for licensing. This is the beginning of a longer-term transition to expand PitStop Server functionality to include new Switch capabilities when the user is ready, providing them with future-proof automation capabilities.