Am just wrapping up 3 days in Philadelphia at the OnDemand conference in Philly. Has been an interesting show overall, although the quality of the educational sessions I attended were slightly below average in most cases. I hate panel discussions. I know some will disagree, but I cannot remember the last time I attended a panel discussion I thought was truly effective (and that includes many that I have been a panel member on). For some reason, most of these sessions were PDs.
This conference which is focused on commercial printers and enterprise content management users does have somethings of interest to Pres Pros – especially the Graphic Designers among us (although there are better places to get this information and I would not recommend this conference for most of our Council members or VB readers).
I had a chance to get up to speed on Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 and the upcoming release of Quark 7. Both have some support for enhanced work flow management in general, and the relatively new JDF (Job Description Format) standards specifically. Although I can’t go into JDF at length here – it is an interesting development that Graphic Designers should become familiar with. There are of course many other upgrades and enhancements to these softwares as well. I thought the new digital asset management tool called Adobe Bridge that is included in CS2 was pretty interesting, especially for small operations that don’t have access to larger enterprise solutions.
Many of us who have been in the presentation business for a long time have fond memories of the days when Kodak was our primary vendor. Although they have struggled to make the jump to digital they do appear to be making some progress. I was very impressed with their digital color production press called the NexPress. It competes with the Xerox iGEN(3) and the Indigo digital press. All of them are great high volume digital printing solutions if you have half a million or so dollars lying around that you don’t know what to do with.
Posted by Robert Befus in Hardware, Software, Technology
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