Today, workflow is a well-understood term, and also has become a major element of most printers working solutions. All major suppliers offer workflow as a part of their product portfolios. 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

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 Delano 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 utilizing Adobe InDesign CS4 with a digital asset management system. Agfa sourced technology from Spanish developer Seinet, which has been extended using well established Apogee-components into an 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 publishers, advertising agencies, brand owners, and corporations with print producers.