Xerox Corp.

JOHN HURT spoke quite candidly when he addressed the crowd at April’s IPMA conference. The International Publishing Management Association has gone through some hard times, he said. Membership and conference attendance has declined, and a lack of clear business and recruitment policies have hindered growth. All that is changing now, continued Hurt, IPMA’s international president. Not only did this year’s IPMA conference in Las Vegas draw an increase in attendees over last year, it generated a profit for the first time in years. The association’s cash flow has been positive for more than six months, he added, its sponsorships are increasing, it has enacted

For the second time in its history, the IPMA has changed its name. At the IPMA 2006 conference a week ago, International President John Hurt announced that the group will now be known as the In-plant Printing and Mailing Association, a more descriptive name than the previous International Publishing Management Association. The conference, which took place in Las Vegas, brought about 125 in-plant managers together, including a good number of first-time attendees. Among the highlights: • Jim Firestone, president of Xerox North America, gave the opening keynote address. He discussed how the convergence of communications technologies and the expectation of personalization is changing the way

DESPITE THE rise of digital color printing, in-plants still have a pressing need for good black-and-white printers. These devices form the backbone of many an in-plant. In-plants can sink or swim depending on which printer they choose, though. To help you make the right choice, here are some tips from in-plant managers who have gone though the selection process. First Tip: Know what you’re getting “We did a lot of research,” says Bev Lucas, “and determined what features we needed, and determined which equipment would fulfill our requirements before we contacted vendors.” As manager of Printing Services at Bellevue Community College, in

RISING FROM the barren desert along the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, Vic Conrad’s in-plant boasts one of the country’s most desolate locations. “I look out my window and I see mountains and fields and desert,” says Conrad, manager of Publications/Media Support at ATK Launch Systems Group. His 53-employee operation in the basement of the ATK administration building is part of a sprawling complex of manufacturing facilities spread over a 20-mile area near Promontory, Utah. The main plant itself covers about 19,000 acres. “We have our own water supply and electricity and cafeterias,” he adds. “There’s nothing here, just us.”

SOFTWARE E-ticketing with Hardcopy Jobs Rochester Software Associates has introduced QDirect.SCAN Connector for eCopy Share­Scan OP. QDirect.SCAN enables electronic job ticketing with hardcopy submission directly from multi-function printers (MFPs). Users log in for accounting purposes and specify options such as duplex, stapling and paper stock. Those choices, along with the scanned documents, are transmitted to QDirect, which generates a confirmation receipt that is printed at the requestor’s MFP. An electronic job ticket is automatically created from the user entry. The resulting print-ready file can be sent to any printer in the in-plant. Software Delivers Jobs ‘To Spec’ Quickcut has introduced QuickPrint 5, the

IN A WAY, Pete Hoekema’s career has been book-ended by In-Plant Graphics magazine. In a 1975 article, we caught him at the beginning of his career, when he was a printing manager at the Foremost Insurance in-plant, overseeing 14 employees and dreaming of expanding into color printing. Today, after 30+ years as graphics manager at Muskegon Community College, Hoekema is looking forward to his retirement in December. “It’s been great,” he says of his career, almost all of which has been spent in the former logging community of Muskegon, Mich., along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Hoekema was born not far

Agfa ApogeeX 3.0 workflow software is based on PDF, JDF (Job Definition Format) and Digital Film. Featuring a single, easy-to-use user interface, it offers a range of capabilities. Provides extensive process automation and connectivity features. Apogee PrintDrive enables integration with non-Agfa workflow solutions and output systems. New step-and-repeat function requires a page to be RIPed and trapped only once. Apogee Raster Blaster helps integrate most non-Agfa output devices into workflow. Apogee Power Converter converts legacy formats to PDF. :Delano 2.6 project management system offers extended JDF connectivity. It offers better support for spot colors, an improved user interface and faster system responsiveness.

ALL COPIER manufacturers are now offering hybrid color copier/printers that any company can afford. These products, suitable for business-quality color applications, generally produce less than 40 pages per minute (ppm), with even faster units promised by the manufacturers for 2006 and 2007. Canon, Xerox, Konica Minolta and Ricoh (also offered under the Savin, Lanier and Gestetner labels) have been the hybrid copier/printer manufacturing leaders to-date, but Kyocera Mita, Toshiba and Sharp have also offered hybrid products of merit. This article will explain the reasons for the hybrid copier/printer revolution and what the advantages and challenges are to consumers going forward. Color Hybrids Defined

ABBAS BADANI is not afraid to be blunt when talking about his in-plant’s past performance. “There’s no question that the way it was, wasn’t really working,” says Badani, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Multimedia & Print Center (MPC), in University Park, Pa. In short, up until a few years ago, the in-plant was still staffed and equipped for 1970s-level production. It was losing business, expenses were rising, and most of the campus viewed it as merely another vendor, not as a core part of the university. “We were very stagnant, I think, for a while,” notes Mike Poorman, assistant director, who has been

Xplor joined up with Graphics of the Americas last month to bolster its conference. Did it work? By Bob Neubauer AFTER WATCHING attendance at its conference dwindle since the booming days of the '90s, Xplor International teamed up with the successful Graphics of the Americas (GOA) conference this year, putting on a joint event last month in Miami Beach that drew about 24,500 attendees, according to organizers. The partnership seems to have been a wise move, as it freed Xplor from the task of organizing a trade show, allowing it to concentrate on its educational mission. GOA, in turn, got a host of