Hagen

By Bill Esler LAS VEGAS—Aiming to improve the odds for business success, 700 Printcafe management system users converged here June 9-12 for Connect 2002, the annual user meeting. Also present were 120 personnel from Printcafe and 13 exhibitors. Licensees of ProGraph, PSI, PrintSmith, Logic, Hagen, AHP, Automation and Elysium systems—all linked by the Printcafe umbrella in 2000—heard CEO Marc Olin's roadmap for cross-platform application development and Web utilities. These applications will ultimately work within all the management systems offered by Printcafe. Among several new items was PrinterSite, a Web browser application for Hagen Systems to check job status, customer ordering and sales

The sea of e-commerce companies is expanding; Seybold Boston was wired, so to speak, to the Internet. printCafe, a new Internet endeavor, captured the most attention at the Boston show last month, but so did new digital workflows, color management tools and Adobe's latest—a bridge for PDF. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Walking into Seybold Boston last month it seemed almost unbelievable that the words Internet and startup are still synonymous. Everywhere you looked, it was dotcom this, dotcom that—if you stood still too long, you were at serious risk of finding a dotcom appearing after your last name on your Seybold badge. Then

Implementing computer management systems arm commercial printers with a key to unlocking print production bottlenecks—on and off the Internet. BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO Any printer will report that a breakdown in the communication process in any phase of the print production cycle can be debilitating. Printers, quite simply, do not have the luxury of easily absorbing workflow bottlenecks—from the moment a purchase order comes in, through the prepress and printing processes, to the second the product is lifted off the finishing room floor for shipment and the customer, promptly, is billed for services rendered. Good news: There are a host of fine technology

When Wallace, the $1.5 billion printing giant that built its empire in forms and labels, absorbed Graphic Industries two years ago, it positioned itself as a true commercial printing force. Once Graphic Industries joined Wallace, however, one fact became clear: Wallace needed to bring its expanding commercial printing group's management information system up to speed with the first-rate proprietary computer management system employed in its forms and labels empire. What to do? BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO WALLACE, a sophisticated commercial printing giant pumping out nearly $1.5 billion in sales, had a very, very big challenge. After all, how does a printing empire, built