Online Delivery/Preflight/Distilling/Proofing/Sign off

[abc]

Is anybody doing any of the above?

I'm starting to look at in and wondered if anybody had an experiences, thoughts they might like to share.

Basically looking to push the preflight upstream so when a job comes through the door its ready to go.

[sharpy98]

We are doing online preflighting and delivery. We developed the preflight in house with outside help. We are working out the kinks now but really happy with the outcome so far.

[geozinger]

I guess it depends upon your budget. And possibly your level of expertise.

We use MyOrderDesk.com for this kind of thing. We primarily use it for the FTP/HTTP transfer and the online creation and ordering of business cards. There is a feature called PDF2U that allows a user to create PDF's that are sent to your site. It's similar to the "Print to Kinko's" that they distribute to their clients. The nice thing, is you can set up a trial site that will work and take in files, but costs little or nothing. If you like it you can step up to one of the professional packages for a monthly fee. No user fees, etc. It's not perfect, but for a small shop I still think it's a good deal.

You could spend a some real money and go with something like printable.com. Their structure is more flexible and more expensive. That should be all you need to know about that...

We investigated doing our own thing several years ago. We consulted a local ISP to set up something similar to what you're looking for. They estimated it would cost us $10K to start PLUS server space, engineering fees for additional changes, etc. As you can guess we didn't go that route.

[mattbeals]

There are some tools available, there are some sites already available. It just depends on how much you want/can do in house and how much you want to spend.

[abc]

I know there are lots of possibilities, that's why I would like to here from people who are doing/have done it.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

[Mjetz]

We do that. We are a Creo (soon to be Kodak) shop. We use Creo's Synapse Prepare to have clients make "certfied" PDFs that are uploaded to a a Creo Synapse InSite Server. The PDFs are RIPped, Trapped and posted back to the InSite Server for Approval. The whole system is really slick. We use it with an Apple Xserve and Creo Brisque workflow, so we had to do a little rigging of our own to make it work. But with Creo Prinergy it all works very easily.

We have a few customers using it and they like it. However, the customer needs to be a knowledgable customer who's files are built correctly. Garbage in, Garbage out. We focues on the larger clients that gave use Rip ready PDFs or suppplied us with nearly perfect files. We're an international company so our affiliates in Japan and Europe are going to start using the system within the next year.