It’s not a secret that composition solutions have a level of complexity when it comes to creating and editing communication templates. Despite efforts to create WYSIWYG interfaces that resemble or even plug into Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign, the complex business rules that drive the content and testing required to ensure integrity of the communications can be a barrier when it comes to making what seems to be minor changes.
As an industry, this is where we look to post composition and document reengineering solutions to handle these. Typically used to add production marks, mailing management, and other production efficiency edits to documents when the document lands in the print queue, these solutions are often IT-centric.
For production environments, this is more than sufficient. However, today’s situations and limited IT resources can create a bottleneck for defining these post composition processes or managing one-off scenarios and exceptions. As some of the change requests that are coming up more and more are visually based; such as replacing a black and white logo with a color, adjusting tables to allow for a graphic to be added, adding marketing barcodes and pURLs, and much more, having an interface that enables a non-IT person to make these edits with a visual discretion, makes more sense.
CrawfordTech has addressed this issue for quite some time with a desktop UI that sits on top of our solutions, including our document reengineering and transform engine (Operations Express) named PRO Designer.
PRO Designer is CrawfordTech’s desktop graphical user interface that is used for document reengineering and post composition editing. The approach that all changes should occur prior to composition isn’t always feasible in today’s enterprises and production worlds. Functions such as replacing outdated logos, changing fonts, adding production barcodes, or even optimizing a file for inkjet printing are challenging and inefficient to quickly put into place pre-composition, particularly when post-composition technology is available.
With a few settings using right-click menus and pop-up windows, all this and more can be done in PRO Designer, enabling your IT staff to be freed up and putting the control and creativity into the hands of business users.
