Carlsbad, California - Tucanna Software & Development, industry innovator and developer for print production automation and quality control solutions is proud to launch version 2 of its online job-submission and collaboration system tFlow Approval. Major improvements to the user interface make the product easier than ever for both the supplier and the receiver of artwork, a hosted version of tFlow Approval removes all barriers to start using the software immediately without any IT headaches.

A clear dashboard for you and your customers

The new dashboard in tFlow Approval 2.0 provides real-time information on job state (pending artwork, approved, on hold with preflight errors, released to production); a clear view of where you are with all projects. It also provides information on operator workload, capacity and capacity problems, activity log with links to all comments, jobs and orders, approvals and artwork requests. All of this was designed to give you and your customers a view on the amount of jobs and their status at the blink of an eye.

Even beyond the dashboard, better filtering controls make it easier to work with high volumes of jobs. Jobs and projects can now be filtered by company, user, job state and date range. Users can also easily find specific projects as the new version introduces free text search. The new drag-and-drop interface for artwork also makes it easier to supply artwork (up to 1,9 GB now) to tFlow Approval.

Removing administration and implementation overhead

tFlow Approval 2.0 can be configured to allow clients to create their own account; this means an administrator doesn’t need to pre-create accounts for clients, which removes a lot of administrator overhead in situations where one-off clients are an important part of the system’s users.

Likewise the new hosted solution (SaaS) can significantly lower implementation overhead. In many cases setting up and maintaining a web server and optimizing it for performance is still a significant IT burden; the possibility to use tFlow Approval 2.0 fully hosted takes away that burden and allows you to get going with an implementation quickly.

Happy customers

tFlow Approval is an easy to use collaboration platform for submitting, annotating, preflighting, and tracking jobs and files. Together with tFlow Production, Tucanna offers its customers a full production automation and online collaboration suite that brings together customer service representatives, clients, creative professionals, design agencies, brand owners, and printers.

tFlow customer Jared Smith, President at bluemedia is excited: "At bluemedia, our focus is on customer service and excellent communication. Implementing tFlow has allowed us to create a seamless interaction with our customers to approve art files and alleviate potential challenges before a job goes into production."  Kyle Reich, General Manager at bluemedia adds: "tFlow reduced our workflow errors by over 20% within our 2 months testing period.”

Online Collaboration

tFlow Approval can be installed in the local network or in the Cloud, and is accessible via a standard web browser, greatly enhancing the job-submission workflow and customer approval process by replacing countless emails, low-res PDFs, and images which would have required being sent back and forth to all members of the project. In tFlow Approval, all files, comments, annotations, versions and job histories are stored in one place, eliminating the confusion that multiple files and conversation threads stored across many users’ computers entails.

Automation is the key to success, and tFlow Approval includes many tools to ensure a seamless and simplified workflow. Adobe CS connectors provide creatives with direct access to the system from within native applications, permitting them to define routing and parameterization via XMP data embedded in file slug lines. Automatic email notifications inform users of new files, status changes, revision requests and uploads, as well as project approvals, and a dynamic status bar informs the logged in user of any changes in the system. Connectivity to other important elements such as Web2Print and MIS systems are also contemplated via hot folders and XML processing.

Webinar & availability

David van Driessche will give an English webinar about tFlow Approval onOctober 8 2014 at 4 pm CEST. To register for this free webinar, please click here.

If you'd like to test tFlow Approval, please send an email with all your contact details to [email protected], and Four Pees will contact you in order to set up a test server.

tFlow Approval is available as a license purchase as well as subscription. For more information about pricing, please send an email to [email protected]or call Four Pees on +32 9 237 1000.