inRiver

01 Effectively manage the creative chaos

The process of creating high profile printed material is not only very dynamic, but also contradictory. On one hand, there has to be room for individual creativity, but on the other teamwork is crucial. Crazy ideas are needed, but there cannot be a single spelling error, wrong price or wrong dimension. inRiver Adobe integration allows creativity, but gives you the tools to control the process. It gives full freedom for the design department to confidently work with data of the highest integrity.

Producing catalogues, fact sheets, user manuals, advertisements and other printed matters is one of the least optimized and least controlled processes within most organisations. The main reason for this is the lack of process support and poor integration to other systems and processes. Manually creating and updating documents in Adobe InDesign is open to numerous problems: 

• Copying and pasting texts language by language, layer by layer makes it hard to know what has been updated and where.
• Keeping images on local hard drives and file servers without version control, access control and usable search facilities makes finding and updating images difficult.
• The manual and tedious review process that overwhelms the mail server when PDFs are sent around the organisation for approval takes time and misses important errors.
• Translations that arrive one day before deadline makes the creative department work overtime, all of the time.

02 inRiver Adobe integration

This is where inRiver Adobe integration comes to the rescue. It will store one master copy of images, texts and product attributes - the single product truth - in the PIM repository. Maintaining the information under version control, access control and consistent in all channels, makes it much easier to find information. Searches can be made using product attributes such as item number, colour, product group, product name etc. Using the inRiver PIM system together with the Adobe integration will make all this information available directly from InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Bridge. Therefore the identical information which is used in the web site, web shop and other channels can be created, updated and used by the creative department.

We call our approach semi-automatic, although it can be configured to produce your catalogs at the push of a button. Semi-automatic production with InDesign means that all product information is available within InDesign and/or InDesign Server, and when it is inserted into a publication it will stay linked to the PIM repository. From that point any changes to the product information in the PIM repository are instantaneously available to the publication. It will let you control the look and feel and optimize the space in every page, but stay connected to the database at all time. The server can help you with formatting, reducing the amount of tedious and repetitive work, thus saving valuable time and money in the process. If you produce publications in multiple languages you only need to create the first one in a base layer, the rest is taken care of by the integration that will generate new language layers for you. In short it makes the process as effective as automatic production, but without the drawbacks of limited formatting and huge amounts of touch-up work.

03 Summary of benefits:

• Dramatically shortened production time. Up to 90% of the repetitive tasks can be automated. Saves time and money.
• Full freedom to the design department with data being correct all the time. Reduces publication errors.
• All pages that are generated with InDesign Server can be opened in InDesign for touch-up, keeping the references to the content in the PIM repository.
• Start production before all material is translated and channel ready. Makes it possible to take product level decisions later or be channel ready earlier.
• Keeps the information updated and keeps quality and consistency in all publications. Speeds up product revisions.
• Work directly from the Adobe CS 4, CS 5 and CS 5.5 applications through the tight integration with the PIM repository. No need to leave the creative environment to work product content in the PIM system. 
• Can automatically create product and item tables, specification tables and comparison charts in InDesign.