Kehl, Germany – In his opening address to a record audience at Dalim Software’s North American User Organization (DUO) annual meeting, Dr. Carol Werlé, CEO of Dalim Software, reported that 2004 was Dalim Software’s best financial year ever, registering a nearly 15% increase in earnings before interest and taxes. Werlé’s presentation kicked off a successful DUO meeting February 20-22 at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in New Orleans. Presentations provided an insight to Dalim Software product development for the coming year, and helped users with hints and tricks to get more out of the industry’s most flexible production automation software. During the meeting Scott Tully of Vertis and Lee Edberg of Brown Printing were elected to two-year terms as DUO President and Vice President, respectively. They replace Scott Pellicone of Quebecor World and Ken Kingston of Parade Magazine who completed their tenures. “I am honored by the group’s vote, and I look forward with great anticipation to serving the group,” notes Mr. Tully. “I view this role as the group’s advocate, and I look forward to representing the users’ interests to Dalim Software.” The conference’s Keynote Presentation was an overview of JDF by Martin Bailey, Senior Technical Consultant of Global Graphics Software and CEO of CIP4. Mr. Bailey talked about the promise of JDF and considerations of implementation from the customer through MIS to production. JDF was a topic of considerable interest among the group. In a related product demonstration, Gee Ranasinha and Stephane Klein of Dalim Software demonstrated how JDF instructions could be delivered from a PDF file generated by Adobe Acrobat, v7.0 processed by DALiM PRINTEMPO according to those JDF instructions, and delivered and output to a Xitron Navigator RIP, with RIP settings dynamically configured from the JDF instructions. One of the highlights of the meeting was a user panel discussion of prepress and business operations trends. George Brian of Harper House, Dallas, TX, Steve Daniel of Integra Printing, Grand Rapids, MI and Scott Tully, Vertis National Operations discussed topics ranging from how their companies were tying their production automation software with MIS Systems to their views of implementing JDF. “We remember when, quite recently, our DUO annual meetings were held in a small meeting room. About a third of all Dalim Software installations are now in the States. Our U.S. reseller network has done a terrific job,” remarks Dr. Werlé. “We thank our customers for the faith they have placed in our software to help with mission critical production and are pleased that a good number of Dalim Software users view the annual meetings as a helpful learning forum. We also learn a great deal from them. Many of our ideas for product development come from meetings such as this.”