AIIM ON DEMAND- PHILADELPHIA -- Pageflex, a division of Bitstream Inc. and DirectSmile announced today that DirectSmile Online has been integrated with the Pageflex product line. The move couples Pageflex's enterprise variable publishing solutions and market-leading Web-to-Print offering, Pageflex Storefront, with DirectSmile's powerful image personalization engine for production of print and electronic marketing/media. Demonstrations are available at the On Demand Conference and Exhibition, being held this week in Philadelphia, PA, in the DirectSmile booth #2612 and Pageflex booth #2417.
 
Several customers including Prime Group in the UK and Frecklebox in the U.S. have been utilizing the Pageflex Storefront – DirectSmile Online combination to great success. "As one of the leading creative print companies in the UK, we continually seek out technology that enables us to offer the best products to our clients," said Jon Tolley, director, Prime Group. "When we developed our new line of personalized calendars, we turned to Pageflex and DirectSmile Online. The integration enabled Prime Group to quickly and efficiently customize every image and aspect of the new calendars."
Pageflex Storefront and DirectSmile Online have played a critical part of the success and appeal of Frecklebox's customized books and gifts for kids (www.frecklebox.com). "The appeal of these books is the way children can experience themselves in the story by seeing their name in different personalized imagery," said Mark Sarpa, owner of Frecklebox. "Together, DirectSmile and Pageflex, enable us to achieve the level of personalization that we – and more importantly the kids who read our books – find engaging and exciting."
 
DirectSmile Online is an open system that delivers variable documents and personalized images and animations to all print, web and electronic mediums. Its scalable, production-ready platform can easily be configured to meet each customer's need, from low-volume runs to more than one million personalized web-resolution images in 24 hours.
 
Pageflex Storefront provides printers, marketers, and corporations with an easy, flexible and scalable solution for creating an online store for personalized and customized documents and cross-media campaigns. Pageflex Storefront can be easily configured to automate many critical steps in the Web-to-Print workflow and eliminate bottlenecks in the traditional print ordering process. Online stores can be up and running rapidly as set up is simple, and do not require any software engineering expertise.
 
"The relationship between Pageflex and DirectSmile enables customers to expand the boundaries of how they use personalized images to customize their documents. That innovation continues with DirectSmile Online, which, together with Pageflex, has enabled customers to develop projects that use more personalized images than had been previously possible. These projects have expanded our customers' product offerings and helped them open up new lines of business," explains Anna Chagnon, Bitstream President and CEO.
 
The key capabilities for customers using Pageflex Storefront with DirectSmile Online are:
 
- Real-time preview: Personalized images and variable documents preview with ease utilizing core and load balancing technology
- Seamless integration: DirectSmile Online's clip and picture font rendering combined with Pageflex Storefront document customization adds emotions to the printed materials for immediate customer gratification
- Scalability to production level image personalization: DirectSmile Online offers unparalleled rendering speed allowing the production of a few to hundreds of thousands of personalized images in just a couple of hours. For Pageflex Storefront customers that host calendars and other image intensive documents this results in fast processing times for customized documents.
- Web-based Administration: The DirectSmile Online server monitor and Storefront Administrator both enable real-time management utilizing browser-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
 
The integration with DirectSmile Online also brings these benefits to Pageflex Persona, Pageflex Server, and Pageflex Campaign Manager customers.
 
"The power to personalize any image or document, with specific imagery that reflects the buyers business and/or purchasing decision is a powerful one," says Edward Ickowski, director of sales and business development at DirectSmile. "The integration with Pageflex Storefront, gives businesses the ability to fully personalize the e-commerce experience for their customers."