Rochester, NY - PODi, the Digital Printing Initiative and Caslon, a PODi Affiliate recognize a growing need to support the heart of the digital print industry – the operations, technology, and production teams. With the creation of Production Central, digital print pros will have a dedicated source for tools, educational resources, and peer connections to help them navigate changing technologies, increase efficiency and up-time, and keep presses running smoothly.

"PODi is well-known for the research and tools we provide to the sales and marketing side of the digital print industry," says Dave Erlandson, Caslon GM. "With Production Central we intend to emphasize our commitment to the whole company, including the folks tasked with choosing, mastering, and implementing the latest technologies. Users will see a growing number of resources, like our updated Web-to-print Selection Tool which we've just released and Digital Print Production Best Practices, which we'll be compiling from conversations on the DEX Tech Forums. We're also adding a series of tech-focused webinars to the schedule as well, like this month's session on Augmented Reality: Making Print Interactive with Noora Guldemond of metaio."

Production Central is targeted to digital print production and operations managers, press operators, prepress, and IT directors who want to keep up with new advances, increase print-on-demand efficiency, automate processes, discover Best Practices, and optimize equipment performance. Initial resources include:
- DEX Tech Forums. Private, online peer communities, managed by Caslon, for people at Service Provider companies operating HP/Indigo, Kodak, or Xerox equipment. Users can get fast answers and participate in discussions on color calibration, substrates, VDP workflow, and more.
- Web-to-print Tools, featuring an all new, updated comparison of over 100 features from 11 leading web-to-print systems. The spreadsheet allows users to rank the importance of each feature and create a total score for each supplier, thereby allowing users to narrow down their search to a select few vendors
- Technical Webinars & Presentations. Recorded webinars on topics like automation, web-to-print, and Personalized URLs; plus presentations from past AppForum conferences.
- PPML & CheckPPML_Pro. The latest specifications and tools for running PPML, a high-performance, device independent printing standard that enables high volume, high speed personalized print

Production Central access and the new monthly technology webinars are free to all PODi members.