Product of the Week

With the launch of Apogee Suite, Agfa has taken a good look at where the print market is going and overhauled its workflow products to meet the changing demands of publishers and printers.

Pre-media has got to the stage where there isn’t much more of the workflow that can be automated between PDF creation and actually printing the job. The advent of PDF workflows, of which Apogee was the original more than a decade ago, and the subsequent development of digital and remote proofing, web-based file submission and JDF integration with printing and finishing, has enabled printers to take out labour and time in their own operations.

However, while digital technologies have enabled these developments to improve competitiveness, the advent of the web has also increased the pressure on printed products to be cheaper, quicker and simpler to produce, to feed our insatiable demand for information.

It is to meet those needs that Agfa has introduced the most significant new part to Apogee, Publish, which is aimed at publishers and brand owners. With the addition of Publish there are four components of Apogee Suite, each of which are made up of different modules and options: Publish, Portal, Prepress and Color. Previously known as Delano, Apogee Portal includes WebApproval, StreamProof and Project Manager tools. Prepress is what was formerly known at Apogee-X. Color includes the SherpaProof system, ColorTune colour management package, Ink Save separation optimisation tool and Sublima screening.

“Everything is slotting into place, from design to press,” says Agfa systems solutions specialist Chris Burn. “We’ve realigned everything to fit into these different categories; in the past, the modules have been a little disjointed.”

Within Apogee Publish, Agfa has two core products: Apogee Media, a publishing system for magazines and brochures, and Apogee Secuseal, a series of five Adobe Illustrator plug-ins that each apply a different image security technique for brand protection and anti-counterfeiting.

New ground
At the heart of the publishing system, Apogee Media is a digital asset management system, which is divided into two sections: a catalogue for archived materials and a production section for current jobs. Additional modules include a flatplanning tool, a page planner for templating pages, a page editor, search facility and a pre-flight checker.

The page planner and editor are based on Adobe InDesign, while the pre-flight tools are based on other Apogee core technology.

The market for Apogee Publish is new territory for Agfa, and the firm believes it is creating a new sector of the market for an integrated publishing system that can be implemented gradually module by module. As it’s a new market, the firm has spent the past six months getting out and talking to potential customers, and also trying to speak their language – partly through the appointment of Apogee Media account manager Charles McCrostie, who comes from a background in newspapers and contract publishing.

“There are a lot of players offering publishing systems for newspapers, but it’s not something we’ve come across in the magazine sector,” says McCrostie.

Favourable reaction
The firm has spoken to magazine publishers of all sizes, from industry giants to some of the smallest operations, and by the time Drupa comes around at the end of May it expects to have a UK customer confirmed to join the two overseas firms whose experiences will be shared at the show.

In sharing its plans with magazine printer customers it has also found that, due to it being accessed via a web browser, there is interest in using the software to offer a hosted magazine publishing service for their smallest customers.

McCrostie says selling to publishers will strengthen Agfa’s business; publishers are also reacting favourably to buying software from a firm with its scale and global reach.

“A lot of software companies publishers deal with are small; they [the publishers] love the idea of the support of a larger firm,” says McCrostie. “Our contract with News International is important in showing our service and support.”

Following in the footsteps of Gradual Software’s (now owned by Esko Artwork) concept of phased integration and automation of publishing workflow, one of the central claims made for Apogee Media is that the individual modules can be rolled out piecemeal to make the staff training and implementation more manageable and successful.

“A lot of the feedback from potential clients is that the barrier to implementing this sort of system is not just money, it’s the time’,” he says.

As for the benefits of Apogee Media, McCrostie claims no publisher has described it as a tool to reduce headcount. “There are two responses,” he says. “Firstly, people can do a new edition of a title with the time saved without taking on more staff, so it’s more work without any extra costs. But the bigger thing is time saved in putting together a publication, allowing later deadlines for the sales team, which offers potentially huge benefits from additional revenues.”

Agfa prices Apogee Media based on the number of concurrent user licences a firm would need. It estimates a 60-staff firm would need 20 licences, and the price including software, hardware, integration and support would be £60,000.

While Apogee Media may be the most significant single upgrade to the Apogee Suite, there is something new in the three other modules, Color, Portal and Prepress.

The separation of Color reflects the increased interest in colour management at all stages of the workflow, according to Burn. Color products, such as the improved ColorTune, which includes support for the latest Fogra specifications, can be used to colour calibrate the entire workflow and is intended to be used alongside Portal and Prepress.

The big colour development is the InkSave option for separation optimisation, which Burn claims is unique in being integrated into the workflow at the print engine rendering stage. As well as reducing ink consumption – Burn claims a theoretical saving of up to 30% and a more realistic customer supplied figure of 13%, which will almost pay for the cost of the module during the trial period for high volume users – early adopters are reporting other benefits. Not only do standardised separations make printing to specification simpler, the reduced ink coverage is reducing drying times. “We thought ink saving was the main benefit, but our customers are telling us the others are more important,” says Burn.

In Apogee Prepress, formerly, Apogee-X, Agfa has upped the JDF capability with integration to finishing systems, including Polar’s Compucut. It has also beefed up integration to digital presses from passing through a PDF file to include full control of the digital machine using JDF.

As in a recent version of Apogee-X, Prepress is based on the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) to ensure file integrity and support of files created in the latest Adobe CS applications.

Apogee Prepress features a new module called Platemaker, which replaces PrintDrive, which enables high volume sites to build redundancy into their systems and makes it easier for Apogee to drive third-party platesetters.

Having integrated its pre-press products under the Apogee Suite banner and divided the product into different solutions, each made up of different modules and options, Agfa has made it easier to understand the components and for users to configure a workflow that meets their needs and budget. There are no off-the-shelf configurations as customers get a pre-sales audit to determine what they need, with a bespoke solution created from that consultation.

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SPECIFICATIONS
Apogee Suite’s four modules at a glance
Apogee Publish
Secuseal is a set of five brand protection plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator. Media is a publishing system aimed at magazines. It includes flatplanning, page layout and pre-flight
Apogee Portal
Previously Delano, Portal provides project tracking, online job submission and approval via its Project Manager and WebApproval tools and high resolution soft proofing using StreamProof
Apogee Prepress
Previously ApogeeX, Prepress provides the core PDF-to-plate processing, it includes enhanced JDF control of digital presses and post-press and a new module Platemaker for continuous plate output
Apogee Color
Color is a new module within Apogee Suite and includes ColorTune, SherpaProof and Sublima as well as new separation optimisation tool InkSave
Price
Starting from £6,000 for a very basic system to £300,000. Typical configurations for
commercial printers range from £20,000-£60,000
Contact
Agfa 020 8231 4929 www.agfa.com

 

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THE ALTERNATIVES
Dalim Twist
Twist is a fully-automated JDF-enabled workflow popular in the publication pre-press market. Sister product Mistral includes Publishers Production Flatplan for production management and the new Virtual Library technology provides a real-time 3D proof.
Price from £6,000
Contact Turning Point Innovation 0870 7744501 www.t-point.co.uk

Esko Artwork Odystar
Flexibility is the overall theme with something for everyone, whether it’s the publisher looking to bring production in-house or the printer who wants to give their pre-press a productivity boost.
Price from £8,700 for Odystar Connect, “typical high end system” £24,000
Contact Esko 01527 585 805 www.esko.com

Heidelberg Prinect Printready
The pre-press component of Heidelberg’s factory-wide Prinect workflow. It is modular, starting from the page-based P package up to larger configurations driving multiple output devices.
Price from £6,000, typical system £15,000
Contact Heidelberg 020 8490 3500 www.heidelberg.com

Kodak Prinergy
Kodak groups its pre-media offerings under the Unified Workflow brand. Its equivalent to Apogee Portal is the Insite range, Prinergy is the challenger to Apogee Prepress and Colorflow, the rival to Apogee Color.
Price Prinergy from £20,000
Contact Kodak 01923 233366 www.graphics.kodak.com

Screen Trueflownet
Screen sub-divides its Trueflownet workflow range into the Rite range of online job submission, proofing and approval tools, Trueflow PDF workflow and Color Suite of colour management and screening tools.
Price from £15,000
Contact Screen UK 01908 545800 www.screeneurope.com