Virtual Systems Corp., provider of business management software for print, mail and fulfillment, today announced the release of the latest version of Digi-Shop, a breakthrough program for managing cross-media campaigns, direct mail, email distribution, and postage.

Digi-Shop is designed for specifically for companies that provide web-to-print, digital print, mail services, and other data-driven marketing services. Digi-Shop is the "missing link" that creates estimates, plans and tracks production, and accounts for postage while allowing for faster turn on invoices and detailed cost and profit analysis.    

More and more commercial and digital printers and mailing service providers are adding value-added services ranging from direct mail or direct email to complex campaigns incorporating pURLs, personalized landing pages, response management, and fulfillment. Unfortunately, traditional print MIS are designed to manage manufacturing processes, not data-driven, transactional activities.

"The XML schema underlying Digi-Shop has made it possible for us to use Web Services to integrate with a wide-range of web-to-print applications," said Chris Huber, President & CEO, Virtual Systems. "Using the same process, we can pass data to customers' existing print MIS or accounting systems for billing and invoicing. There is no need to change front-end or back-end applications to manage value-added services like pURL, email, direct mail, fulfillment, or Internet response marketing."

Digi-Shop is available both as an add-on module to Mail-Shop or as a freestanding application. Current Mail-Shop SQL users can quickly add digital print capabilities to their existing systems. Functionality includes:
    •    Estimating: Digital print estimating (standard); sheet-fed and web estimating are available for an additional fee.
    •    Pricing Wizards: Designed for pricing and managing cross-media campaign services such as email distribution, pURL creation, and internet response tracking from personalized landing pages.
    •    Set-Up Department Management: A management resource to manage an entire digital, print, mail, and response campaign from end to end through a single module.
    •    Web-to-Print Interface: A two-way communication that accepts orders from web-to-print storefronts, prices the jobs, places the orders into the production system, and returns "job completed" notification when the jobs have been produced. The web-to-print component can be customized to interface with any third party web-to-print application.