European Premiere for Gradual's major upgrade
SWITCH 07 at Digital Print World
Ghent (Belgium), September 2007 — Gradual Software, specialist in publishing automation solutions, will debut SWITCH 07, its newest automation solution, to the UK market at Digital Print World, held October 16 -18th, 2007 in London, UK. The company will present live demos of SWITCH 07 at booth 158 along with their UK distributor Positive Focus. SWITCH 07 is a major upgrade to the complete SWITCH product line (the entry-level LightSWITCH, mainstream FullSWITCH and advanced PowerSWITCH).
The SWITCH 07 upgrade features substantial user experience improvements, extends built-in automation capabilities and provides support for automating many additional third-party vendor applications. Saskia Desmet, Director International Sales at Gradual Software comments: “We're looking forward to introducing SWITCH 07 to the UK market. This new upgrade directly addresses the additional requirements of our customers who are already benefiting from the SWITCH product line to create flexible and efficient automation workflows."
One of SWITCH 07's technical strengths is its 20 configurators; they provide configuration and automation of key third-party applications directly from within SWITCH and can be added to a flow using simple drag-and-drop. This capability is so important to SWITCH users that Gradual launched a separate communication platform called Crossroads, aimed at helping users understand how different applications can be used together to form complete workflow solutions. The configurators provided by SWITCH 07 can be used for PDF creation, preflight, color manipulation, proofing, image manipulation and more…
Additional SWITCH 07 innovations include better ways to organize and identify flows, the ability to lock flows down to protect them from tampering, and user interface enhancements throughout SWITCH designer.
The new upgrade makes dynamic processing of jobs possible via added support for variables; these make it possible to refer to job properties and embedded metadata without the use of scripting. Ivor Dixon, Managing Director at Positive Focus states: “Introducing variables across the whole product range adds real power to LightSWITCH and FullSWITCH and will also appeal to PowerSWITCH users with limited scripting experience. Variables are relatively easy to use, even with little training, yet allow complextasksto be automated within a SWITCH flow.”
Troubleshooting of automated workflows becomes much easier thanks to better logging (enhanced search, export of log messages as XML) and a new dashboard that provides an instant overview of any problems in the active flows. Problem resolution is significantly improved; SWITCH 07 includes special tools for handling problem jobs, automatic notification and retries for failing processes.
Pricing information (including upgrade pricing) for SWITCH 07 and a fully-functional trial version can be found on the Gradual Software website at www.gradual.com
About Gradual Software
Gradual Software was established in November 2004 to develop and deliver software to accomplish full automation across the numerous stages of professional publishing workflows. Gradual’s core product line called SWITCH, is designed to benefit all participants in the publishing workflow, including content originators (authors and designers), content processors (editors, designers and layout artists), brand owners (publishers and marketing departments) and service providers (printers). Gradual Software is privately held by its management team, and is located in Ghent, Belgium. For more information, please visit www.gradual.com
About Crossroads
Crossroads is a multi-vendor platform for communicating about publishing automation solutions, founded by Gradual Software. Centered on the robust SWITCH automation technology, Crossroads pulls together a large ecosystem of software vendors offering automation products for publishing workflows. Crossroads targets the complete publishing workflow: it presents solutions for job reception, PDF creation and preflight, color correction, proofing, image manipulation and more. For more information, visit crossroads.gradual.com.
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