By: Erik Vlietinck
Fri, August 31, 2007 - 4:37:00

http://www.gradual.com

Gradual Software released SWITCH 07, a major upgrade to the complete SWITCH product line (the entry-level LightSWITCH, mainstream FullSWITCH and advanced PowerSWITCH). The upgrade features substantial user experience improvements, extends built-in automation capabilities and provides support for automating many additional third-party vendor applications. SWITCH 07 is a payable upgrade for existing customers.

“The SWITCH products have been installed in hundreds of companies over the last year,” says Peter Camps, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Gradual Software. “Our users provided us with valuable feedback on their additional requirements and we’re very pleased to provide an answer for them with SWITCH 07.” The SWITCH 07 product family is available immediately and a fully-functional evaluation version can be downloaded from the Gradual website at http://www.gradual.com.

SWITCH’s existing success is based on its ability to easily build new flows and tweak existing ones. SWITCH 07 takes a technical leap forward by making it even easier to build and maintain flows. New improvements include better ways to organize and identify flows, the ability to lock flows down to protect them from tampering, and user interface enhancements throughout SWITCH designer.

The new upgrade makes dynamic processing of jobs possible via added support for variables; these make it possible to refer to job properties and embedded metadata without the use of scripting. Troubleshooting of automated workflows becomes much easier thanks to better logging (enhanced search, export of log messages as XML) and a new dashboard that provides an instant overview of any problems in the active flows. Problem resolution is significantly improved; SWITCH 07 includes special tools for handling problem jobs, automatic notification and retries for failing processes.

SWITCH 07 includes more than 20 configurators; these provide configuration and automation of key third-party applications directly from within SWITCH and can be added to a flow using simple drag-and-drop. This capability is so important to SWITCH users that Gradual launched a separate communication platform called Crossroads, aimed at helping users understand how different applications can be used together to form complete workflow solutions (see separate press release). The configurators provided by SWITCH 07 can be used for PDF creation, preflight, color manipulation, proofing, image manipulation and more…

“Allowing people to automate those applications they already have and trust, directly from within SWITCH, is really key,” states David van Driessche, Chief Operating Officer at Gradual Software. “It’s so important to us that now we’ve also made it possible for partners to write their own configurators using the expanded scripting interface in SWITCH.” In fact, we’re using scripting ourselves to write many of our own tools and configurators.”