Foster City, Calif. - Aug. 2, 2006 - EFI, the world leader in digital controllers, superwide format printers and inks, and print management solutions, today announced the formation of the Web Products User Advisory Council to facilitate a two-way dialogue with customers of its popular Web solutions, including the PrinterSite suite of products and PrintSmith Site. The User Advisory Council was conceived at this year's EFI Connect conference, the largest annual user conference in the print industry, and plans were formalized soon after. "Connect provides an opportunity for unparalleled interaction between customers and EFI staff, but we wanted to provide a more focused venue for the fast growing web products portfolio, since they are increasingly mission-critical for our customers," said Marc Olin, senior vice president/general manager, EFI Professional Printing Applications. The council meetings are open to all current EFI Web product customers. The first meeting, focused on PrinterSite users, took place in mid-June at EFI's Pittsburgh office, with 50 companies in attendance, and the PrintSmith Site council meeting took place last week, with 20 companies attending. "I was very impressed with how customer-focused the EFI organization is and the direct access we had to all the EFI people that are involved with making the web products better," said Peter Oostland, director of customer service at Hemlock Printers Ltd. (Burnaby, British Columbia), an EFI PSI and PrinterSite Internal and PrinterSite Fulfillment user. "It's the first time in my 30 years in the business that a printing software developer has asked for my input! The discussions about product direction were spirited, sometimes passionate. At the same time, we offered each other suggestions on solutions we developed in our own shops. A forum like this is really a win-win for our company, EFI and the industry in general." Chuck Gehman, director of product marketing at EFI, said: "We knew it would be extremely valuable to form a strong relationship with a small, focused group of customers, and the initial interest in the Advisory Council has proven just that. Our main goal of the council meetings was to listen, listen, listen and engage in an interactive dialogue. We also shared our product road-maps for the web applications and went in-depth with customers on the very important topics of MIS and workflow integration. Going forward, we'll feed the group's comments and feature requests back into the product development process, where customers will see tangible results from the time they spend at the meetings." EFI plans to hold three Web Products User Advisory Council meetings per year, with the next one slated for February 2007 on the West coast followed by a meeting during Connect 2007, taking place June 10-13 at the Wynn Las Vegas. For those customers who attend the meetings, there will be exclusive on-going communications from the company throughout the year. For more information, please contact Chuck Gehman at [email protected].