4/10/01 - Responding to comments from potential members that its requirements were too restrictive, PrintTalk, Inc. has amended its membership agreement to enable broader industry participation. The PrintTalk board agreed at a March 17 meeting to remove from the organization's purpose and scope statement a sentence reading: "Members will support direct data exchange from any compliant print management system to any e-commerce application with no more than one hosted application between buyer and printer firewalls." According to Stephen Hallberg, Chairman of the Board of PrintTalk and President of Parsec Corporation, "we discovered that some potential members who wanted to join could not meet this requirement, and we felt it better to make this change and enable PrintTalk to continue to gain the support of the broader printing and graphic arts industry." William K. "Kip" Smythe, Administrator of PrintTalk, added: "PrintTalk has now positioned itself to gain broader adoption of its open architecture philosophy. We want the industry to be able to actively participate in the development of a standard that will make e-commerce solutions easier to implement by print buyers and printers alike, and we encourage all industry suppliers to join the organization and support our work." The new scope statement for PrintTalk, Inc. now reads as follows: The purpose of PrintTalk is to drive the rapid and consistent adoption of broadly published and open standards that will enable secure electronic commerce and application integration between e-commerce companies that assist print buyers in specifying, ordering and tracking their printing, and companies whose software manages and tracks the print manufacturing process. PrintTalk will define a "best practice common and open communications interface between these companies. The PrintTalk interface will be distributed free of any license fees or royalties, in order to enhance end-to-end connectivity of all companies. Membership in the group has grown to 24 companies despite the data exchange requirement. Recent additions to the group include Four51, Inc. Fuji Photo Film, IKON Office Solutions, ImageX.com, Nexpress, PrintOrigin.com and Triple Arc, Limited. PrintTalk is a community formed by print management systems and e-commerce companies to define a "best practice" common and open communications interface between their products. The PrintTalk implementation supports use of the broadly published, proposed Job Definition Format (JDF) standard for its job specification semantic and Commercial eXtensible Markup Language (cXML) to define the business objects. As part of the group's activities, it is seeking to have its work recognized as an implementation of the proposed JDF standard by submitting the PrintTalk implementation to CIP4 for inclusion in its specification.