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Canon just announced the release of its PRISMA Go Suite with PRISMA Home, PRISMAprepare Go, and PRISMAlytics Accounting—and here’s why that’s interesting. PRISMAprepare Go and PRISMAlytics Accounting are the first two members of PRISMA Home, Canon’s new cloud-based platform for production workflow solutions, and they address some significant industry needs.
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PRISMAprepare Go Looks at Job Onboarding in Another Way
There are many e-commerce and web-to-print portal solutions out there, and PRISMAprepare Go isn’t one of them. It approaches the challenge of job onboarding and management from a different perspective.
Canon sponsored a 2021 NAPCO research study that concluded while two-thirds of communication buyers have used online ordering for print work, they only submit about a quarter of their print work that way. Over half of them still upload or email their print files—an attitude that doesn’t appear to be changing. There are many reasons for this, ranging from security concerns to non-print-ready files or a preference for e-mail. PRISMAprepare Go addresses those concerns rather than fights them.
It doesn’t have a single submission portal or website. Instead, the solution generates micro-sites where each customer can securely upload and view their jobs. There’s nothing to browse through or any complex job programming. Just upload your files, give your job a name, and type a note. And since that’s all customers need to do, this cloud-based application only requires a few minutes of configuration by the shop.
Submission is simple, clean, and painless—and so is job reception and management in the shop.
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Jobs land in an intake queue so they don’t get lost in an e-mail folder. Print files are automatically preflighted and CSRs can accept them, which moves them into a production queue. From there, operators can preview the jobs in various views, program the job tickets, imposition the pages, and (of course) send files to printers. PRISMAprepare Go can work with PRISMAsync, imagePRESS servers based on Fiery technology, Canon controllers, and other Fiery-driven controllers with JDF. It can also access the media catalog information from all connected printers, which makes job setup a snap. And the base package includes most of this, with advanced impositioning available as an upgrade.
PRISMAprepare Go is a vast improvement over onboarding jobs via email and file transfers, especially for small to mid-sized in-plants and PSPs. You don’t have to worry about downloading, saving, and renaming files because it comes with 10GB of secure Microsoft Azure cloud storage, which you can increase. PRISMAprepare Go won’t make you a lights-out operation, but it will get more jobs into digital production workflows more quickly.
PRISMAlytics Accounting Automatically Reports PRISMAsync Accounting Data
PRISMAlytics Accounting addresses a common challenge for the many PRISMAsync customers who need to collect and report on print and customer utilization for chargeback and billing purposes. This manual task can be time-consuming as operators must pull information from each PRISMAsync server and consolidate CSV files into a spreadsheet. PRISMAlytics Accounting automatically uploads this information to the cloud from all registered PRISMAsync devices on a schedule of your choosing. It comes with several standard reports you can view onscreen or export to CSV or PDF formats. In addition, the base version is free for PRISMAsync customers with a PRISMA Home account (also free).
PRISMA Home Is the Place for PRISMA Solutions
PRISMA Home is the cloud launching pad for Canon’s cloud-based tools and applications. I expect Canon to continue migrating and adding solutions to PRISMA Home. It is a simple, clean, well-thought-out, cloud-based production solution platform. I particularly find PRISMAprepare Go an ingenious way to solve a decades-long printing problem: How to get customers to submit digital jobs without using e-mail and file transfers.
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