Special Report: The Three Ps - Five Production Professionals Share Their Views of Today’s and Tomorrow Best Technologies

Borhauer: XML. More specifically, JDF [Job Definition Format], which is a comprehensive XML-based file format [and] proposed industry standard for end-to-end job ticket specifications, combined with a message description standard and message interchange protocol.

JDF is designed to streamline information exchange between different applications and systems. … It provides not only a solution, but a flexible and comprehensive one. It’s capable of creating a bridge between each separate island in the printing stream, from the moment a customer places an order to the moment the finished product is placed in the customer’s hands—regardless of how many manufacturers contributed machinery … or how complex the task.