Product Almanac 16 February 2011
This week sees the release of Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection Version 9 from Fuji Xerox.
Fuji Xerox has released its Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection Version 9 to provide digital print providers with enhanced productivity, expanded job opportunities and improved client liaison.
Designed to maximise productivity, FreeFlow Version 9 will appeal to commercial printers, franchise and shop front printers, inplant operations in education, government and corporate environments, service bureaus, mailing houses as well as marketing specialists.
The collection offers new productivity tools to automate many routine processes required for efficient production, accelerate the throughput of jobs and free up staff to focus on core tasks. By streamlining routine prepress and job scheduling tasks the Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection further improves job turnaround times and reduces operational costs.
Version 9 Includes:
• Freeflow Express to Print, which features visual page exception programming and automated prepress workflows. With over 50 predefined document or job templates, developed by Fuji Xerox’s industry marketing professionals, Express to Print can automate frequently repeated jobs with minimum human intervention.
• Freeflow Print Manager’s Advanced Print Path introduces an integrated print manager and job ticketing workflow, using the industry standard Job Definition Format (JDF), for offset and/or digital workflows. A single access point can control a fleet of Fuji Xerox printers, including Freeflow Print Server, and digital front ends from Creo and EFI.
• Freeflow Makeready streamlines document composition and make-ready operations to reduce manual intervention and improve productivity. Comprising a suite of Xerox and third party software products, Freeflow Makeready Version 9 now offers additional flexibility with the option of using any generic TWAIN compatible scanner to maximise efficiency in scan and print applications.
• Freeflow Output Manager automates the allocation of jobs to printers, and is able to schedule jobs according to priority and/or attribute matching. Workloads may be balanced so that large jobs can be split, multiple copy jobs can be separated, and colour and black-and-white pages in a PDF job can be separated to suit print windows.
• Freeflow’s Variable Information (VI) Suite combines several products for users to customise and improve their variable information workflows. Design templates can be linked to customer data, with the result that only the data is sent to the printer while static and variable elements are merged on-the-fly. This dramatically reduces file sizes and significantly accelerates processing. An electronic version of the job is automatically created without any extra workflow steps.
Peter Brittliff, marketing manager, production workflow solutions at Fuji Xerox Australia, is excited about the opportunities that Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection Version 9 brings to the Australian market.
“Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection is an extensive portfolio of integrated software products specifically designed for the Graphic Communications industry. This collection allows print providers to help their customers better connect with their audience, reduce costs through automation enabling new business opportunities for our customers. In a nutshell, Freeflow Digital Workflow Collection is about making print production faster, more streamlined, more intuitive and in the end more profitable,” said Brittliff
“The new version is about three times faster in process management. We took our customers’ needs into consideration and added the extra functionality they have been asking for. As a result, this version meets their requirements in several key areas such as automated processes and workload balancing.”