At PrintMedia Management's recent Pre-Press Strategies 2004 conference these challenges were confirmed by customers and suppliers alike. Adobe reports that whilst the trend is towards more PDF workflows they continue to come across customers who still do not know much about PDF. "We still have customers who send those native files through," says Chris Kitchener, Adobe's business development manager for creative professional publishing.

"While there is a strong background now in PDF workflows and advances are being made significant members of our industry are still struggling to understand the basics. It's not because the basics are hard, but because they're stuck with what they've always done: five years ago they sent native files and that's what they've continued to do."

However, Adobe is seeing a large move towards PDF workflows. Kitchener reports that once customers move to PDF they never look back: "PDF-X is accelerating the transition by helping people get it right the first time. The mainstream adoption is there and it's new products like Acrobat 6 and PitStop combined with better education that's going to drive greater acceptance of PDF to become the dominant workflow format."

Adobe also hopes that the integration of PDF creation within the latest page makeup tools such as InDesign, where there are 'simple settings' will take away the mystery of making good PDF files. This was a point echoed at the conference by PDF consultant Jon Bessant who works with both Adobe and Enfocus products.

"People do have problems understanding PDF workflows and PDF creation at a very basic level. A lot of my time is taken up in training people how to make a good PDF file and remembering which menu options to select. People need to remember that the systems they're using are highly configurable, but many are not viewing the file as it's going to be RIP'ed at the printer. So it's very important from my perspective to make sure that people are aware of the 'road map' whilst making files so they know about the tools that are available to help them make a print ready high resolution file."

Bessant agrees that the combination of the latest tools and education will make a big difference: "If we could just bring up people's skill levels ten or fifteen percent that would make a huge difference later on in the workflow. With the advent of Acrobat 6 Professional when you can create a PDF X 1a straight out of the box and other solutions... the ability to create good files is easier than ever...pre-flighting being bundled with certain applications out there."

Patrick Van Dam from Enfocus observed that there had been a dramatic increase in the level of acceptance for receiving PDF files: "A lot of printers and publishers are up to speed now to use and receive PDF in the workflow and in production environments. But there are still a lot of people at the creative end who don't have the skills yet.

"A role we would like to play in the preflight industry is to develop the software tools to make PDF's easier; software should be smart enough to know what the problems could be at the print site. Today you can make good high-res print-ready PDF files, so there is a communication need."

Enfocus initiated the Ghent Workgroup of industry associations and major publishers like Time Inc. which aims to communicate standardisation in PDF delivery across global markets. "We're also seeing a lot of demand in automation and colour management, but JDF is rapidly becoming a major talking point. The way we see it we have to add functionality to the PDF so it has more information, metadata and job ticketing. So this is where we'll be focussing our product development."

Andy Walker of Fuji confirmed the growing interest in JDF as people gradually got a better understanding of the benefits it could support. He told the conference that customers were not interested at first: "JDF means nothing to our customers, They're completely ignorant. We've found it's very good for integrating internal modules, never mind the JDF communicating with MIS systems.

"At drupa we'll be showing more things around remote submission of jobs; preflighting at the production end with automatic response on what's wrong with the PDF, or normal files because a lot of our customers still use postscript files. That's integrated with web proofing where you can annotate and approve and even to the extent you can alert people to the fact that certain pages are missing and even initiate plate-making.

"So a few months ago when you mentioned JDF people weren't interested, but if you ask whether they want remote submission of jobs, remote pre-flighting and things like auto-imposition, they say yes, they really want that. So a lot of it is around us helping our customers to understand where they can benefit from the technology," added Walker.

The growing integration of content management systems has become an important and dynamic component of modern workflows. Andy Heather of Picdar says he has seen a big transition in the way asset management systems are being implemented. "Digital asset management was originally seen as a large scale bucket in which you put assets and took them out. Now it's become an active component of workflow which is usually approached in two stages: the first is to clearly define business objectives and time spent on this is very valuable; the second is to take control of content within the business.

Heather says it is also important to define the business rules on how you want to use the content to support business processes and then to define the robotic actions that people end up doing, being digital administrators rather than being creative. Earlier in the day the conference heard how the Picdar system was part of a large editorial system at Associated Newspapers.

"Associated is taking control of its images. They receive around 20,000 digital photographs a day, that could rise to 30-40,000 during the Olympics later this year. Every image is given a unique number and allocated to the database automatically before anyone sees it. Everything that happens to that asset can be tracked and its usage controlled, whether it goes to print, new media or for marketing," explained Heather.

Communications is now an integral part of workflow with file transfer for approvals, remote proofing or supply to printers migrating from ISDN to alwayson broadband networks. Darren King of filetransfer.co.uk said that ISDN has been slow to move to new technologies in the UK, but that the issue would be forced as support for the format was phased out by suppliers.

"Our key task is to make that transition as easy as possible, whether FTP or via Wamnet, Vio, or others. We're aiming to move 25% of isdn users to always on technology in the next 12-18 months."

Tim Daly of Wam!Net, now a part of Savvis, said that they had to support key markets in a way that differentiated them from 'commodity' network providers: "The key issue for Wam!Net is to bring an understanding and an empathy for the markets that we deal with; print and publishing is a core market for us.

"So we have to understand what the market is doing, where it's going and where it wants us to go. Integration and how we work together is the issue, not the technology. Its about making a workflow work all along the supply chain...we want to make sure we're part of that workflow going forward."

Daly called on delegates to involve everyone in the workflow in developing improvements. "The biggest successes are when you involve everyone and open the channels of communication. At the end of the day we've all got to be in business together and help each other to make money."

Customers on the panel confirmed the challenges ahead. Kevin Pembroke from Brann Direct has had to bring together direct mail, data and print operations to serve a growing European market. "We're involved with print on demand, templated documents and digital asset management, so we're looking closely at workflow. The big challenges include creating a seamless PDF workflow and integrating the fast turn around of data for personalisation on-line for European-wide campaigns."

Ian Buttery of Thomas Cook has developed a workflow capable of turning around up to 500 travel brochure pages a day. "It's important to have a good operating system. Apple OS 10.3 Panther helps create a seamless workflow with AppleScript. Moving forward the main project is adding value to PDFs with metadata to respond to brochures on demand so we can create a personalised document; this requires structured data within the PDF so we can repurpose it."

The ability to successfully implement new workflows was highlighted by Simon Hedger from Penguin. He maintains that it's important to manage change: "You have to consider everyone in the value chain and bring together knowledge across departments. You have to accept that people are going to be scared and you have to reassure them that everything is going to be alright; so a communications plan has to run alongside the change plan."