In a two-part series, WhatTheyThink.com presents the details of All System Integration’s exciting new pre-media tools that range from file delivery systems to successful soft-proofing processes that enhance overall workflow processes. In Part One, Steve Shinnick, founding partner of ASI, describes the key tools to successfully integrating a critical color digital proof process at one customer's catalog design office. Part two focuses on ASI's launch of RipFarm and other new tools that turn the Internet into a virtual design and pre-press space.

Steve, All Systems has developed a whole on-line Electronic Pre Manufacturing (EPM) technique by artfully integrating a range of products in the market. In part one, you described some of the quality and time-enhancing workflows ASI developed in the front end of project production, digital image capture and proofing. Now we move onto the creative and pre-press stages of periodical, advertising, and other data. Even a quick demo of your new software indicates ASI has developed handy tools to help creative staff use the Internet in a whole new way - as a virtual studio. Describe for us how you set up this workflow and how users access these productivity tools.

For the last 10 years we’ve seen a need for all production services and assets to be available on-line. Our mission has dealt with changing the belief that not having data local constrains the production process. Workstations (Mac and PC's) that have Internet access should simply be client machines in a distributed client/server or client/data workflow. So we have been working at the digital plumbing problem of connecting users to data wherever it may reside -- corporate networks/storage, firewalls, the Internet, network-attached and Internet-addressed storage. We created RipFarm as the digital plumbing solution to making the Internet just another workflow conduit.

In 1993 we integrated a solution for Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine that produced a distributed direct-to-film solution over the Internet with a soft proofing option. One page of high resolution prepress was produced in NYC and distributed to Quebecor World’s Clarksville, TN, plant every six minutes during Fortune’s production runs. Quebecor did not have to buy $2,000,000 of equipment to process the work from NYC; they only had to purchase the file pass-though equipment required, which cost $300,000. We were able to use remote equipment for the value-add to the process and simply distribute the output.

This integration was built on a philosophy that turned into RipFarm: We see no need for processing equipment to be local unless turnaround time is just too tight (such as, under an hour). If commercial quality ripping equipment is $50,000, it should be available for use 24/7. That provides the greatest leveraged use on such expensive equipment.

If a traditional trade or commercial print environment uses the equipment less than 24/7, why isn’t the equipment being used by someone else needing high-end processing and who’s set up to pay a user fee for that "leased" time? This is the Application Service Provider model and the basis for RipFarm.

So first you developed the concept of high-end processing on an as-needed basis, or the RipFarm module. Next you’ve looked to the industry for a user-friendly module for workflow productivity to work in tandem with RipFarm. Tell us about LayoutWizard and how it is utilized in the creative and production workflows.

One of the missing pieces that corporate clients have been requesting is a template-based creative tool through an Internet browser to displace the need for expensive layout software. In this case, we assume true design is a creative process: once created, it is reused as a standard for quality.