Solving Integration Barriers
PrintTalk is on the verge of first-round implementations aimed at open data flow.
By Lisa Leland, Associate Editor -- graphic arts online, 2/1/2001
Last June's inaugural meeting of the fledgling PrintTalk Consortium represented the first gathering of printing industry e-commerce firms anywhere beyond that of a trade show floor.
"The dynamic was very interesting," recalls Steve Hallberg, president of the non-profit organization, which is now 26 members strong and includes all the major players in the dot-com marketspace, save that of printCafé. "We asked them to leave their egos and weapons at the door, and they did. It simply came down to the popularity of the idea, and the unanimous agreement that it makes perfect sense: we should be doing things together on this level."
This détente of sorts, held in San Francisco, was set up to devise a common and open interface for direct communication between the e-commerce solutions and business management systems in use among graphic arts firms, enabling job management data to flow freely and openly between these systems, thus simplifying their use.
PrintTalk, also represented by graphic arts manufacturers and providers of business management systems to more than 5,000 printing companies, defines itself as an implementation of the proposed Job Definition Format (JDF), which was engineered by Adobe, Agfa, Heidelberg, and MAN Roland as an industry standard for end-to-end job specification.
Process of change
In July, these founding companies agreed to turn over rights to JDF to the CIP3 Consortium, thereby changing the latter to CIP4 (International Cooperation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress).
In turn, CIP4 granted its blessing to initiatives from PrintTalk (now a formal member of the CIP4 movement), whose formal operational procedures are overseen by NPES The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies. PrintTalk's contributions are referenced in the JDF specification, and both JDF and PrintTalk are international open standards initiatives available to all.
Looking at the complete workflow-including possibilities to exchange all relevant job description data between resource, planning, and business support systems-JDF describes the appearance of the completed printed product and the manufacturing instructions to produce it. JDF also supports the passing of information or metadata about a job and its unique characteristics from one set of processes or systems to another.
On top of JDF, PrintTalk adds business process descriptions written in industry-standard cXML (Commercial eXtensible Markup Language). So while JDF describes the printed piece, PrintTalk provides a "wrapper" for the JDF to include business processes such as request for quote (RFQ), changes to orders, authentication, and shipping instructions.
Both JDF and PrintTalk are written in XML, a communications language well suited to the Internet and already more widely adopted than pre-Internet messaging technologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI).
"What PrintTalk has done well ahead of schedule, under budget, and on a completely voluntary basis by its growing number of member companies, is to light a fire under everybody and set the pace for data definition," says Hallberg, who expects a first round of live implementations in the printing environment to be conducted within the next month.
Taking it for a spin
In an initial live demonstration at last fall's Graph Expo and Converting Expo in Chicago, a print buyer used Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Impresse Corporation's impresse.com service to create an RFQ, deliver it to a preferred printer, and receive a quote back from the printer with all communications performed using PrintTalk.
PrintTalk member Parsec Corporation received the RFQ, imported it into its estimation software package, and allowed the printer to review the estimate, again utilizing PrintTalk and without any manual intervention. The printer then adjusted the automatically generated quote and delivered it back to Impresse using PrintTalk. Finally, the buyer awarded the job to the printer via impresse.com.
"The next step for the group is to publicly release final documentation as member companies modify their products and release them in a way that's PrintTalk-compliant," assesses Impresse director of commercial print services Jim Mekis, who also serves as vice president of PrintTalk.
Mekis adds, "Everyone must make their own timetable; firms will have to determine when they want to devote engineering resources to PrintTalk support versus when they want to add new features that customers have been asking for. But I think that by the end of 2001, anybody serious about e-commerce will have a software program that's PrintTalk-compatible."
printCafé and PCX
Conspicuous in its absence within the PrintTalk process has been printCafé, which actually represents the impetus for PrintTalk's organization through its announcement last May of the PCX (eProduction, eCommerce, eXchange) platform.
PCX is a proprietary integration specification for interfacing internal systems and services with printCafé solutions, including those from AHP, Hagen, Logic, MData Software, Programmed Solutions, and Prograph-applications used by more than 7,000 printing facilities nationwide, including 17 of the 20 largest commercial printers.
As for trade reports and on-line printer forum remarks pitting printCafé in some sort of proprietary battle with PrintTalk, Paul Gaboury, director of consulting services for printCafé, insists it's "an apples and oranges" argument.
"We're not in the business of creating standards; we're in the business of integrating to partners who offer value to our customers and product line in areas we're not interested in pursuing," explains Gaboury, adding that a lack of resources by printCafé will delay an actual PCX "integration" announcement until at least the second quarter of this year .
"PCX is the equivalent of a business plan for integration, describing the process that any third party wishing to integrate would have to pass through in order to become integrated with one or more of our applications," he continues. "We are open to any third-party firm like Noosh or Impresse applying to integrate with us. The value judgment we make will be based on the synergies between that package and our package."
Says Gaboury, the main reason printCafé decided not to join PrintTalk is that the consortium's primary applications prohibit [the existence of] more than one e-commerce company between the original buyer and the printer.
"That, by definition, means that any transaction occurring on one of their member sites, like Noosh, that wants to go to a printCafé printer's system would have to go through our Web site to get there, since the integration to our print management systems is via our Web site," he explains. "We don't want to be creating massive numbers of integration sets for each of our management systems. We just want one, which is what we've got."
The GCA role
That said, printCafé welcomes PrintTalk's development of initiatives in compliance with the JDF standard, assures Gaboury. printCafé has aligned itself with the Graphic Communications Association (GCA) B2B Standards Committee, a continuation of GCA's EDI committee charged with developing guidelines for electronic information sharing in an XML format between organizations within the printing, publishing, and paper industries.
PrintTalk is coordinating its standards efforts with the GCA committee's interlocking program, the Industry Architecture Project, focused on developing a global specification for the open and interoperable exchange of printing and publishing information.
"We basically came to an agreement with them months ago that we would abide by whatever they came up with, but told them, 'Beware, because we are probably going to pass you up really quickly,'" recalls Hallberg. "At the time, they were still trying to define what a job number was, while we were already in the bindery area. We agreed that if one of us gets ahead of the other, we wouldn't contradict one another."
Gaboury expresses hope that PrintTalk's contributions would be absorbed into the GCA framework, allowing for the publishing population's participation. "GCA has long been involved in setting standards," he reasons. "Whereas PrintTalk has relied solely on software developers, I think we need to go a more traditional route and get input from the business side of the equation.
