Agfa Graphics' award-winning PDF workflow, the graphic arts industry’s first production hub, helps commercial printers and hybrid print service providers innovate, interact, and optimize their customers’ print projects.

Commercial printers and hybrid print service providers who produce both commercial print and wide-format signs and displays, are now using the new Apogee 9, that serves as the production hub for their graphic reproduction. Agfa Graphics refers to it as the “Innovate-Interact-Optimize” solution, bringing printers new levels of workflow simplification, relationship-building and task automation.

“Apogee Suite 9 is our comprehensive tool that eliminates bottlenecks in the print production process,”said Andy Grant, Global Head of Software, Agfa Graphics. “It makes commercial printers and hybrid printers more responsive to their customers’ needs."

Apogee 9: What’s New

Apogee 9 offers more features that allow users to innovate and expand their business.

With drivers for Anapurna, Jeti and a wide variety of other brands, Apogee 9 communicates with a greater number of inkjet printers supporting a multiple-device inkjet operation. This is the universal production hub where users can run every device—CtP systems, wide-format printers, digital presses—from a single interface, and set parameters for each press including finishing options, cut paths and more.  With the new color management feature built in, they can adapt or generate a dedicated color profile based on media type, quality mode, and inkjet output device in a fraction of the time needed by others.  Both features bring a high degree of standardization to the prepress, which makes their production more reliable.

The new version of Apogee Impose now supports perfect-bound books imposition with automatic glue-line support and impositions for perfecting presses with ease. It also enables the imposition of different page sizes in web production schemes.
 
Apogee 9 allows printers to enhance customer interaction and build strong relationships.

A brand new interface for WebApproval makes it easier for occasional print buyers to upload content using drag & drop. WebApproval’s new HTML5 design makes it more efficient as it avoids typical browser incompatibility issues and lets the print buyer interact with his printer at any moment via his PC or smart device.

With the new Apogee Storefront service providers can also start selling electronic products like PDFs, ePub files or website banners. It also lets them generate customized invoices with ease and build new types of stores.

"When the workflow is optimized, tasks are automated and operations are streamlined. The staff is then free to be more proactive with clients," Andy Grant adds. "This ability to Innovate your work, Interact easier, and Optimize customer relationships results in higher quality, more creativity and eventually increased profits.”

Apogee 9 was designed to further optimize the workflow.Because there is more and more demand for different versions of the same documents, the versioning option was enhanced with new features like automatically print these versions on digital presses as separate jobs. This heavily reduces costs because the job handling is much easier.

"Until now we used the digital film concept to 'double burn' our data to do versioning", said Mr Mähringer (Prepress Manager Mediengruppe Oberfranken). "With Apogee 9, the versioning feature on PDF level is the standard now. Adding a new version, change or adding a page is done with greater ease."