Is anyone useing planet press and what do you think of it??

THanks!

Dale

I very recently became an employee of Objectif Lune. So I know hundreds of PlanetPress users! However, I'm not here to hock software, nor interfere with end user feedback. I only post here to say hello, and if there are any technical questions about PlanetPress, I'll be happy to answer them.

Not being familiar with Planetpress, is it worth dedicating a section on this site for it?

I haven't had any one call me on it either, maybe you can share some info on it?

That's really not my purpose for being here, and I'm not a spokesperson for the company. As a fellow forum operator, though, I'd give the generic advice that you only open a new section AFTER there is substantial interest. If you DO develop a substantial PlanetPress userbase, I'd be happy to help.

All of my experience is in the commerical printing industry, with a heavy focus on transactional and financial printing. PlanetPress is extremely powerful, and is geared toward transactional VDP, working with legacy datastreams, and workflow automation. Anyone interested can go to the PlanetPress web site. I'm a particular fan of the PlanetPress Watch product, the workflow automation tool.

But, like I said, I'm not here as an Objectif Lune spokesperson. I'm a technical guy, a programmer, eCommerce developer (I wrote the COIN platform for Consolidated Graphics), and joined just to keep track of what's going on in the industry, and also, frankly, to see how you run a similar forum.

(Re-reading, I hope I didn't come across wrong. I'll happily respond to any questions about PlanetPress, PrintShop Mail, or PrintShop Web... I just don't want everyone thinking that's all I'm here to do. I'm interested in ALL digital printing workflow issues, PostScript development, eCommerce development, etc. and am here as myself, not as an OL employee.)

We use Planet Press for all of our black and white variable printing. It does a good job in this application especially if you are mailing. If you are looking to do color variable there are better options out there. Planet Press does not support color jobs very well. We have done many color jobs with it but we found it to be very slow in generating postscript for large color jobs.

As a pre-sales engineer for Ricoh's Production Print Business Group I often recommend Objectif Lune's products. Most recently I helped to prototype a solution for a variable photo printing project utilizing a combination of PrintShop Mail and Web. What I would strongly encourage anyone to considering any kind of software front end do, and especially the more sophisticated ones, would be to have someone prototype the workflow using your data and software before committing. You should also take post-sale support into consideration.

I worked for a manufacturer of index tabs who used planet press to automate the creation of the pdf's. The customer server person or job planner would enter all the information, planetpress would generate the pdf files and drop them directly onto the digital presses, bypassing the need for prepress to touch these. It also handled website orders for custom tabs, in the same way, the customer selected a tab template, entered there text, submitted and it would generate in the same way.