By: Erik Vlietinck
Thu, March 27, 2008 - 2:01:00

http://www.eskoartwork.com

Peter Camps, Sr. Vice-President Enfocus brand, commented on the EskoArtwork acquisition of Gradual Software. The SWITCH family of products is being merged into EskoArtwork’s Enfocus operations. The resulting new entity is operating as a dedicated business unit within the EskoArtwork group, under the Enfocus brand.

In an exclusive interview, Peter Camps shared with us his vision of where SWITCH will be heading. 

Enfocus aims at the prepress environment, not the press room, and that isn’t going to change much over the coming years if we are to believe Enfocus’ official take on SWITCH’s future. It would be a good idea to have SWITCH integrate with a the press room, though. One of the benefits would be that printers delivering a complete service package including layout and prepress services wouldn’t have to juggle two or three workflow automation systems.

“That’s true,” said Peter Camps when I confronted him with this observation, “and SWITCH is capable of coping with those downstream processes, but currently only when the downstream environment is relatively simple, such as with Xerox DocuTech stations. Some printers using these machines are already using SWITCH to automate that part of their workflow as well.”

Peter Camps didn’t rule out SWITCH to embrace more than just DocuTechs --and without scripting (the DocuTech story is a story of customising SWITCH through scripting) in the future, but it is not yet really certain that it will go that way. Right now, Peter Camps is more comfortable with having SWITCH become more powerful in the area of Digital Asset Management support. “We will support more metadata flavours than before; think EXIF, XMP, etc. SWITCH will be able to use the metadata to automate processes that involve these assets and their management by the DAM system,” he said.

Workflow Automation Extending into MIS

SWITCH will also be able to interact with Management Information Systems (MIS), something it can’t do in its current version. “As I said in my announcement, a future version will support SOAP and SQL. With these technologies it will be easy to build an interface to communicate with the MIS systems,” he said. According to Peter Camps, that will be much easier than with the usually applied tools to work out integration with MIS.

I asked him about what SWITCH will be capable of with regards to editorial workflow systems. In his speech, Camps said editorial workflow systems were fine for the limited task of automating editorial workflow, but beyond this --the area of output-- such systems fall short of what most users need. “Editorial workflow systems such as K4 and Smart Connection Enterprise are good at what their core business is,” said Peter Camps, “but there should be more interaction with external systems. And it is difficult to program such interaction into these systems.”

Although systems such as K4, QPS and Smart Connection Enterprise do offer GUI driven setup screens, I must admit that during my own analyses of these three systems, I often felt sorry for the administrator who has to go through all these screens, check boxes, radio buttons, and other switches in order to set up a workflow that sends a document or document fragment to a next state, depending on user access rights, status, etc. In today’s world, however, I didn’t immediately see an alternative for this tedious and repetitive work.

“With SWITCH we will allow you to set up a workflow so that, when an asset reaches a specific status, the asset is dent to a specific output,” Peter Camps said. “We will be seeking the co-operation of the developers of these systems to create the necessary modules for SWITCH, much in the same way we’ve started the Crossroads story.”

However, if I understood him correctly, SWITCH won’t ever be capable to take out the pain of setting up the workflow of document fragments in editorial workflow systems. He specifically said SWITCH, although being file format agnostic, is not and will not be capable of working with document fragments. “You might right a script to support this up to a point,” he said, “but it will never replace the workflow managed by the editorial system itself.”

Another issue with SWITCH which is not going to be on the radar for future versions is cross-media publishing support. Peter Camps: “We have little support for cross-media publishing and are not focussing on cross-media publishing either. SWITCH --as far as we can see-- will not be able to route a document directly to XML or HTML without the user scripting that in. For the foreseeable future, SWITCH will focus on prepress automation.”