Workflow
EFI Digital StoreFront Web-to-Print Solution Now Features Integration to Popular PrintSmith MIS System
Friday 09. May 2008 - Industry-Leading Digital StoreFront Provides New Ways to Increase Service Levels, Reduce Costs and Gain Competitive Advantage to Key Global MIS Community
EFI (Nasdaq: EFII), the world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today extended support for its award-winning Digital StoreFront (DSF) web-to-print solution to include native integration with its popular PrintSmith Print MIS system. The PrintSmith system is in use by more than 350 print shops in the UK. Digital StoreFront lets print service providers create a unique, intuitive e-commerce shopping interface for their customers, and delivers powerful back-end automation to improve profitability. The newest version, Digital StoreFront 3.3, was officially released yesterday.
“Integration is a big part of the DSF workflow, and building this connection to PrintSmith creates flexibility for a wide range of shops, from commercial printers to institutional inplants and Central Reprographics Departments,” said Danny Morris, regional sales manager, EFI. “With this new capability, customers can place orders on the web and take full advantage of DSFs industry-leading capabilities, while the print service provider can manage their production via the familiar PrintSmith MIS system interface.”
The new integration joins a suite of workflow and web tools available from EFI. PrintSmith Site, the venerable web-to-print option is still available as an add-on for PrintSmith. “The low-cost, high-value PrintSmith Site remains a very compelling value-proposition for a lot of customers,” continued Morris. “Having a choice of either PrintSmith Site or DSF, in an integrated solution with PrintSmith, provides a gamut of capabilities to suit the needs of virtually any printing operation, customer or application.”
With the addition of support for PrintSmith, version 3.3 of Digital StoreFront features out-of-the-box integration with EFIs Print MIS solutions, direct connectivity to Fiery colour digital print servers to MicroPress, EFIs raster-based production workflow solution, and to EFIs VUTEk superwide printing systems via JDF. This level of integration and support from a single supplier, operating across the full range of business and production functions for printers of all sizes, is unprecedented in the industry. “With the complexity of running a printing business in todays highly competitive marketplace,” adds Morris, “being able to implement solutions, which support workflow from web submission to production and invoicing, and which are developed, tested and supported by one organisation, makes it faster and easier for printing firms to gain the business and production efficiencies they need for sustainable growth into the future.”
EFI makes it easy for printing firms to add web-to-print to their offerings with a wide range of configuration options. Print service providers can also select the application hosting model that best fits their needs, including hosting the application themselves or relying on EFI to supply Digital StoreFront in a software-as-a-service model hosted in EFIs world-class data centre. This offers customers the flexibility to migrate from one hosting model to the other as business needs change. Either hosting option may be used with the new PrintSmith integration.
“With Digital StoreFront, EFI provides one of the most scalable and extensible web-to-print platforms on the market”, said Morris. “The depth of integration with other critical business solutions is unmatched and makes it easy for our customers to achieve success right from the start as we work with them to Print to Win.”