AFP Consortium

AFP Chat with the AFP Consortium President & Secretary Harry Lewis

An OutputLinks Conversation With Harry Lewis

President and Secretary, AFP Consortium

Program Manager IP & Open Standards

Ricoh Production Print Solutions

Ian Shircore: Harry Lewis, as the first-ever President and Secretary of the AFP Consortium, quite apart from your leading IP and open standards role at Ricoh Print Production Solutions, you must have quite a job on your hands. You have 32 members, with different – often conflicting – commercial interests, from global giants like Xerox and Kodak to small specialist companies in the US, Denmark, France and Austria. How can you ever hope to keep everybody in step? Isn’t this like herding cats?    

Harry Lewis: No, actually, it has been a very positive, energized and forward-looking group of people, right from the start. Honestly. And that stems from the history of the consortium, going back to the time in 2004 when IBM decided that open collaboration was the way to add color management to its AFP format, which had been their proprietary property since the 1980s. They formed the AFP Color Consortium and set up bilateral agreements with each of the members to govern the way the work should be done. But that was a great start for everyone. Because everybody could see the result was even more powerful than if we had just kept the doors closed and architected it within IBM.

Ian Shircore: The open standards approach worked immediately?

Harry Lewis: Yes, because we had members like those from Kodak, with a depth of knowledge in color science and its practicalities. That was a great advantage. Other members brought in their own expertise and perspectives, too, and it was all in the name of keeping AFP viable and moving forward.

Ian Shircore: But this was all specifically concerned with color management, was it?

Harry Lewis: It went on like this for two or three years, while they got the color architecture nailed down. And then, of course, people stopped and looked around and asked: “Well, now what do we do?” They could see that this way of working was effective. They didn’t want to slide backward and have AFP just go back and be reabsorbed into IBM, so there was some discussion about broadening the collaboration to cover any architecture change. People started working on a few other, quite minor, things and, at the same time, there began to be discussions about how we should form ourselves for the future.

Ian Shircore: So this is a key moment. At this stage, the actual ownership of AFP is presumably vested in the InfoPrint joint venture that has been formed by IBM and Ricoh. And it’s InfoPrint that’s paying your salary, so by this time you are effectively on both sides at once, aren’t you?

Harry Lewis: If you look at my responsibilities and roles today, I suppose I still am. But as the new body, now called the AFP Consortium, was taking shape, I was becoming heavily involved in setting it up. I was very strong in forging the bylaws and the intellectual property policies and the member agreements and all that. I became the incorporator of the Colorado company and non-profit. I worked with the legal team – we even had lawyers cooperating across all the different companies… These days, if we have working groups that aren’t being as effective as they should be, I always try to shame them by saying: “Come on, folks. We even got the lawyers working together, so we must be able to do this.”  But what we have now is a genuinely cooperative, collaborative non-profit consortium, dedicated to supporting and enhancing a completely open architecture that has proved its worth over many years.

Ian Shircore: You say “enhancing”. Isn’t it mainly a maintenance role now?

Harry Lewis: Not at all. Far from it. We have a roadmap of planned enhancements that stretches as far as the eye can see. We have a backlog of things various members want to see tackled. In fact, a lot of my role, as President of the AFPC, is about tugging back on the reins, holding back the enthusiasm of consortium members who want to do everything at once. It doesn’t always make me popular, but it’s part of my job to make sure we don’t take on so much that we fail to do a proper roll-out of the enhancements we select as our priorities.

Ian Shircore: And how does the work actually get done? Do the AFP members collaborate electronically or do they get together at all, perhaps for an annual meeting?

Harry Lewis: Obviously, there is background work going on all the time, with conference calls and web meetings. But the key events are our major four-day meetings, which we usually hold twice a year. There’s normally one in the US – often here in Boulder, Colorado – and one in Europe, though not exactly in the prime resort destinations. We’ve been to all kinds of different EU locations, with meetings hosted by Océ in Poing, near Munich, by ISIS-Papyrus in Vienna, and recently by MPI Tech in Bagsværd, near Copenhagen. The meetings are amazing – intense, energetic, exhausting events, with only 25 or 30 people taking part. There are just one or two specialists from each company, and people really do go there to get things done. So it’s all about working groups and fierce technical arguments, with everyone taking part and no one holding back. People work flat out for the four days and go home drained.

Ian Shircore: It’s obvious that this is one consortium that really does meet the needs of the vendors who are its members. But what are the benefits for the customers, the thousands of production printers around the world who depend on AFP to handle the never-ending demands of high volume variable data communications?

Harry Lewis: Well, what we’ve been able to do is keep all the traditional strengths of AFP and combine them with a lot of subtle tweaks and enhancements. So there’s the killer combination of performance and integrity – blazing fast text speeds, great diagnostics, page level checkpoint recovery – and the practical virtues like real interoperability across systems from different manufacturers and the fact that you can start your print run while the data file is still being generated. We’ve been able to keep legacy systems alive while adding new capabilities in response to emerging needs. That’s a difficult balancing act, as there’s always a debate about what to leave in and what to leave out. But the collaborative approach within the AFP Consortium helps make sure we make the right choices. Decades ago, they got the fundamental architecture decisions just right. Thirty years later, we are still finding ways to get a bit more out of the most popular and longest-running VDP file format in existence.

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me as this blog shares about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: Everyone’s Got a View on the Future Priorities

By Harry Lewis

I sometimes wonder these days what would happen if we all decided AFP had gone far enough, and everyone felt the AFPC’s mission had been completed.

After all, we certainly have robust, tried and tested standards covering all the main issues that originally prompted IBM and the early collaborators from other companies to put their heads together and work for the common good. And we’ve pressed on a long way beyond that, keeping pace with many of the shifts and twists in the printing industry’s development.

So can we, and our customers, afford to sit back and take AFP’s continuing health and relevance for granted?

Well, no. And I’m reminded of that almost every time I find myself talking to customers within the industry. People from different companies may call for different improvements and enhancements, but it’s rare to find anyone who doesn’t have advice to offer about what I should be persuading the AFPC to tackle next.

It’s the customers who know what’s needed

The fact is, we help support many different types of customers. Sometimes I’m talking at a customer briefing to a group of customers who are more low-volume or cut sheet-oriented and they may still ask: “Why do you have AFP? Why isn’t it all just PDF?” We still get that kind of question. 

Then I talk to others – the people who do big statement runs or maybe the print service bureaus – and they know us and love us. They rely on AFP and they absolutely do not take the consortium for granted. They’re delighted we’re here and they always want to hear about what’s going on in the consortium. And they’re very, very pleased that AFP is in this kind of open, collaborative mode and that it’s in good hands.

But they can’t necessarily see the way we’re looking across the board and trying to meet everybody’s needs.

Is there a quorum for a forum?

If I mention, say, that we sometimes talk about possibilities like maybe a project to introduce full JDF integration, as a wild card, way off down the road, they’ll say: “Why would you want to do that?”

JDF is much more likely to be relevant to cut sheet and graphic arts companies and it’s less likely to matter to a high volume printer with machines thundering away through the night. But although the volume companies are our core constituency, we’re still trying to serve a very broad span of customers. 

Encouraging discussion and picking up views and feedback from across the spectrum is actually one area I want to focus on now. Indeed, it’s one of the main reasons for launching this blog. There is no AFPC customer forum yet, and there probably should be.

An end-user forum is something I would like to see evolve over the next year or two, so if anyone reading this posting is inspired to help make it happen, please just get in touch. I’m only a couple of clicks away and I’d love to hear from you today.  

 

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: Sometimes Binary is Best

By Harry Lewis

Even the most logical, factual and technical industries have their fads and fashions, and printing and IT are not exempt.

Looked at from a certain point of view, AFP’s core architecture probably appears a little out of step with the times we live in. While everything else in the world seems to have moved on towards highly structured XML or human-readable formats, AFP is a defiantly binary protocol.

In some circles, binary is almost a dirty word these days. It’s certainly perceived as a negative in many people’s minds. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t advantages to this approach. 

The overall architecture of AFP reflects its 1980s heritage. But, like the familiar Boeing 747 airliner, designed in the Sixties and still being built and improved in 2011, AFP is showing that, even in a high-tech world, the best ideas and designs can have a very long life.

Again, like the 747, AFP is not something you’d expect anyone to come up with in quite this form today. But this is a presentation architecture with real, enduring strengths – a pristine structure, a very deterministic character, and the simple virtues of a binary data stream. Apart from anything else, if you are looking for the highest possible production printing speeds, it is certainly better not to have to allocate time and resources to the task of parsing XML.

Legacy applications and emergent needs

What has become clear over the six years since AFP moved from being an IBM proprietary architecture to an open standard is that this format has not run out of steam.

It continues to serve its core customers very well, enabling them to process complex variable data documents at rated speed, while providing surprising scope to support both legacy applications and newly emergent needs.

Unfashionable it may be. But with a roadmap of enhancements stretching ahead as far as the eye can see, a committed and enthusiastic user base, and the collective wisdom of the AFPC behind it, AFP is well positioned to give newer and glossier pretenders, such as PDF/VT, a serious run for their money.

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: a Model of Cooperation (Mostly)

Give and take keeps the show on the road

By Harry Lewis

Making a non-profit consortium of unpaid volunteers work can be an interesting challenge. In my last posting, I was praising the extraordinary levels of constructive collaboration we see when the representatives of our member companies get together at our main AFPC meetings.

On the technical side, that’s what we get, year after year. And we’ve had similar examples of remarkable cooperation from many other surprising directions.

I remember, for example, back in 2009, the time when we were negotiating the complicated business of formalizing the AFPC’s status as an incorporated non-profit body. There were member agreements, bylaws, and intellectual property policies to be hammered out, and it all needed a good deal of give and take from some of the most powerful corporations in the industry.

As it turned out, it was an amazing experience. Instead of the orgy of haggling, jockeying, and infighting you might expect from a roomful of high-powered corporate lawyers, we saw a genuinely concerted effort to minimize the difficulties and arrive at acceptable and equitable solutions for the common good.

If the lawyers can all pull together…

But then again, it isn’t always such plain sailing. More recently, we’ve been trying to pull together a marketing working group inside the AFP Consortium – and that hasn’t gone so smoothly.

The idea is to get each member company to contribute one or two marketing people and for these specialists to sit down together and work out how to market the results achieved by the AFPC. After all, we’ve got a great success story to tell, backed up by the plain fact that most of the world’s bills, invoices, statements, policies, and other data-driven documents are created using AFP.

Somehow, though, it seems harder to get the marketers to cooperate than either the technical experts or the legal teams. I’ve tried shaming them by saying “Come on, folks. We even got the lawyers working together, so we must be able to do this.” And we will, of course. We’ll do it eventually, when we get the right people in the right place at the right time. One thing you can count on with the AFPC, there’s always the underlying goodwill to solve the problems and come up with answers that work for everyone involved.     

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC Membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: Stand Back! AFPC at Work

Energetic, Exhausting – All About Getting Things Done

By Harry Lewis

I’ve been talking quite a lot in this blog about the debates and dramas that lie behind announcements from the AFP Consortium and each new version of the Advanced Function Presentation standard. But it may be interesting to lift the lid and reveal just a little more about how the consortium operates and how decisions are reached.

The AFPC is very much a working, sleeves-rolled-up body. Everybody involved works on an unpaid, volunteer basis, with regular conference calls and web meetings to coordinate activity and keep everyone on track.

But the key events in the calendar are our two – sometimes three – face-to-face meetings every year.

These are amazing – intense, energetic, exhausting four-day events, with maybe 30 people taking part. There are no delegations, just one or two specialists from each company. There’s no grandstanding and no politics, and people really do go there to get things done.

An AFPC meeting is not one of those trips where you get to relax with friends and contacts in some luxurious resort location, with wafting sea breezes and a single plenary session every morning. This is all about working groups and fierce technical arguments, with everyone taking part and no one holding back.

I’ve been to big, bloated conferences where you find 97 people attending, or 197, or even 997, but there are really just three people who do all the work, lead all the discussions, and make all the recommendations. It’s not like that at AFPC meetings. There are no passengers. Everybody has a point of view and everyone is popping with ideas and suggestions.

In Boulder or Bagsværd, we’re there to work

One of the four-day workshops each year will be in North America, usually hosted by InfoPrint – Ricoh Production Print Solutions, as we are now – here in Boulder, Colorado, though we have also been over to Toronto, as guests of CDP. 

The other meeting will always be in Europe, reflecting the fact that we have many European members, large and small. We’ve been to all kinds of different EU locations, with meetings hosted by Océ in Poing, near Munich, by ISIS-Papyrus in Vienna, and recently by MPI Tech in Bagsværd, near Copenhagen.

So we go to a lot of interesting and unusual places, but we don’t get a chance to see much of them. People work flat out for the four days and go home exhausted. But we get so much done. Like everyone else, I’ve seen standards meetings in the past where it was like trench warfare, with IBM versus Microsoft or Sun versus HP, and it seemed everyone’s objective was simply to make sure the other side did not gain any slight advantages for their proprietary products. 

It’s different with the AFPC. There are no spoiling tactics. We just have a group of very bright people representing all the vendors that market products using AFP and see a value for their customers in keeping AFP viable and moving it forward to address their needs. It’s not unique, I’m sure. But it’s a pretty special privilege to be able to work that way with people of this caliber.    

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: Different Tools for Different Jobs

By Harry Lewis

One of the most misunderstood aspects of the AFPC’s work is AFP’s relationship with other presentation architectures, and particularly PDF.

It may look like a rivalry, and I do hear people saying, from time to time, “Why doesn’t everyone just use PDF?”

But that’s like asking “Why doesn’t everyone drive the same auto? Why does one person choose a Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV and another pick a Toyota Prius?” The fact is, they want to do different things and they will select the option that’s best to get the results they need.

PDF is a great presentation architecture, very useful in all sorts of contexts, extremely successful. And Adobe made a brilliant move when they took the decision to give users a free viewer. That played a big part in getting it used and accepted around the world. But it can’t do what AFP can do.

Although I was involved with the original development of AFP, way back when it was a proprietary IBM standard, I’d been off doing other things for many years. So when I was invited to come back to AFP and re-engage with it again, I had to undertake a fair bit of soul-searching to decide for myself whether I was sure there was still real value in it.

Obviously, I did. And now I’m President and Secretary of the AFPC, I guess the world sees me as the voice of AFP.

Prioritizing within the development roadmap

I don’t come to it from a bigoted perspective, however. I’ve actually spent most of my career far away from AFP, working with print architecture and open standards issues like the original definition of the Internet Printing Protocol and then in corporate intellectual property roles for IBM, Infoprint and now Ricoh Production Print Solutions.

So although I’m a great enthusiast for AFP, it’s only because I see what it can do and what it can be made to do in the future.

We have a total of 32 vendors in the AFP Consortium, and I think I’m right in saying that every one of them provides PDF alongside AFP in today’s product range. So it’s not a war, not a battle, but a choice. As a consortium, we want to be able to provide the best solutions to keep those choices open.

But it’s not just about maintaining the status quo. You should see the roadmap we have for potential developments. In fact, a large part of my role tends to be about tugging back on the reins, holding back the enthusiasm of consortium members who want to do everything at once. It doesn’t always make me popular, but it’s part of my job to make sure we don’t take on so much that we fail to do a proper roll-out of the enhancements we select as our priorities.       

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

 

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: The Day IBM Took a Chance on Collaboration

By Harry Lewis

The history of AFP and the AFP Consortium is an interesting story. What began many years ago as a normal commercial product development within IBM has developed into a worldwide open standard, via a series of gradual steps.

Advanced Function Presentation – AFP – came into being in the early 1980s as IBM sought to improve the speed and operational efficiency of printing environments for organizations producing transactional documents in industries like financial services, insurance, telecoms, utilities, and healthcare.

At that time, of course, there was no question of delivering documents to customers electronically. Every single one of them would have to be printed and sent out by mail. And there was no question, either, of IBM giving away this potentially valuable proprietary format and architecture.

Indeed, it was 20 years later, in 2004 that IBM first began to let other companies in on the act. It formed the AFP Color Consortium (AFPCC) to encourage collaboration among the community of AFP users – including its direct competitors – in the development of robust, practical color management support.

At the time, I guess many of the members were just surprised and delighted to be invited to IBM’s party, especially as there was no membership fee to be paid.

Each member signed its own bilateral agreement with IBM. I wasn’t directly involved then, as I was off elsewhere, doing patent licensing for other parts of IBM. But I don’t think people really realized how powerful this new collaboration would be, as members like Kodak, for example, weighed in with their huge depth of knowledge about color science.

There’s still a lot of work to do

Over the next few years, the consortium grew and its concerns widened out way beyond just color, to reflect the interests of almost every company with a direct interest in high speed printing. With thousands of customers around the world printing tens of millions of documents every working day, AFP became the recognized de facto standard for both mono and color variable data printing. 

By early 2009, the consortium, now renamed the AFP Consortium, had developed such a life and momentum of its own that it became a completely independent open standards body, an incorporated non-profit company with its own constitution and bylaws. 

For me, that was a particularly significant moment.

I’d been there right back at the beginning, at the “big bang”, when PostScript, PCL and AFP had first seen the light of day. I had not had a close connection with AFP for many years, but I became involved in forging the agreements that established the AFPC’s independent status. And in 2010, when the consortium appointed its first President and Secretary to be the voice of AFP, the members chose me for the job.

It was an honor, of course. But I still had to stop and think for a while last year before accepting. I wanted to be sure there was still an ongoing role for AFP and real value in continuing to invest effort and resources in developing it further.

That seems strange now, when I know we have such a backlog of ideas and enhancements we want to address. I don’t know how long I will continue to be so deeply involved with it, but I don’t think there are many of us today who doubt that AFP will be around, and becoming steadily more useful and productive, for a good few years to come.

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

Built for Speed, Architected for Integrity; No Room for Mistakes

By Harry Lewis

Performance and integrity are the two keywords that crop up time and again in connection with AFP, and rightly so. But while performance, at least in terms of ultra-high print speeds, is a pretty straightforward concept, it’s probably worth taking a closer look at what we mean by “integrity” in this particular context.

If you are printing serialized documents that have any kind of monetary value, like checks, or that are highly sensitive, like account statements or medical information, you can’t afford errors. Straight line speed is important, but integrity, good diagnostics and page level recovery are equally critical factors in this kind of operation.

If a jam occurs and a check is printed twice, that’s an obvious problem. We have seen examples, with companies using other datastream architectures, of bank statements reaching John Doe in the mail with Jane Roe’s financial details somehow printed on the back page.

That isn’t going to happen with AFP, and we have a track record of billions of successfully printed documents to prove it. It’s no coincidence, either, because the fundamental architecture of AFP has integrity built in, right from the start.

MO:DCA and IPDS: two sides of the same coin

Let’s go back to the beginning, for a moment. There are two core pieces of architecture that make up the Advanced Function Presentation industry standard.

One is called MO:DCA, pronounced like vodka, and that’s the Mixed Object Document Content Architecture. MO:DCA covers the applications side, what’s generated as a print file. The other is IPDS, the Intelligent Printer Data Stream architecture, which obviously defines what’s happening on the printer datastream side. MO:DCA was originally the brainchild of Reinhard Hohensee, while the main architect for IPDS was Dave Stone.

It’s a key strength of AFP that there has always been such a close correlation between these two sides, and that we have been careful to keep them moving forward in step with each other.

Sometimes people in the consortium will say that they have customers with a particular need or problem that could easily be handled by a small modification, introducing a new field into the IPDS. But we will only make a change like that if it can be made available to all consortium members and if it can be mirrored in MO:DCA, on the application side. In practice, you rarely change anything in MO:DCA without making an equivalent change in IPDS.

As a result, AFP offers a genuinely stable, consistent, and predictable environment where we can carefully preserve its core strengths.

For example, it may seem like a small thing, but we have standardised, architected error reporting. There’s an architected set of error conditions and a consistent way of reporting them. If you’re building a print shop, you are free to buy in formatters, servers, transforms, printers, AFP viewers and archive systems from any number of different companies and the systems will all give similar reports. So if the printer jams on page 3 or it can’t print because it needs a font, you won’t see the Oracle version or the IBM or Pitney Bowes version of the error message, you’ll get something that’s the same across all the suppliers.

Sounds trivial, but that’s the kind of subtle thing that helps a print shop run well and minimize downtime. I’m proud to say that we have ironed out a lot of little, almost unnoticed practical details like that over the years.

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.  

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: Making Progress Without Creating Orphan Applications

By Harry Lewis

If high speed printing is the most obvious benefit the AFPC has secured for its members, the least glamorous must be continuity.

Anyone who knows the print industry knows that it’s seldom like the pictures in the brochures. Instead of matching sets of shiny new machines, all bought at the same time from the same maker and all working in perfect harmony, real-world print shops tend to survive on a mix of old and new, with hardware dating from different generations and coming from several different manufacturers.

And that’s only the part you can see. If you start delving into the systems and applications that drive the day-to-day routines, you are just as likely to find there are vital software elements that date back many years.

So questions about how we deal with legacy situations raise major issues for the AFP Consortium. How far can we push forward and modify AFP for present and future needs, while still providing support for all but the most ancient legacy systems? Should we allow a few leftover legacy applications from the last century to effectively block the development of this important set of open standards?

Questions like this touch on some sensitive vested interests and the consortium has a vital role as the industry’s forum for informed discussion. Just a few months back, we had to face these issues head-on, as we prepared the new IS/3 interchange set that was launched in August.

There was a lot of lively debate about what we should leave in and what we should leave out. The “progressives” wanted to leave certain things out so that AFP could be edged forward, while others pointed out that once you took the decision to leave these elements out, you were effectively abandoning a small minority of customers that were still dependent on very old legacy systems.

AFP’s future in safe hands 

The result, inevitably, was a compromise. But the existence of the AFPC meant it was a fair one, and one that reflected a genuine attempt by the whole industry to balance individual needs against community interests for the good of all AFP users.

In the end, of course, the oldest legacy software and the oldest machines will finally reach the end of their usefulness and have to be laid to rest. When these machines wheeze their last gasp and are replaced with the latest state-of-the-art hardware, we want the customers to be able to keep all the benefits of AFP and not feel that they must immediately transition the entire platform over to PDF.

We want them to have the choice, to be able to choose what is best for their workloads and their own customers.

If they want to move some or all of their operations across to PDF, that may well make sense – and, as I’ve said before, it’s not either/or, AFP or PDF. All the AFPC members offer both. But we have every intention of making sure that those customers who are involved in serious production printing continue to have full access to the advantages of AFP.

This was the first printer datastream and presentation language to be designed from the ground up for ultra-high speed variable data printing. It’s got great strengths, right there, built into its DNA. And with the AFPC taking care of its development, those intrinsic strengths are being built on all the time. For very large database applications with time-sensitive print runs using variable data, AFP is going to take some beating. 

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

My goal in this series is to stimulate a conversation about and recognition of the AFPC. So, please share this series with your associates using the social network buttons above.

I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

For AFPC membership information, touch here >>>.

Regards,

Harry

AFP Consortium: AFP’s Killer Benefit Is Speed

By Harry Lewis

Every now and then, I get asked what AFP’s killer benefit is. And, depending on who’s asking and how much detail they are likely to want, I usually mention the two things that come up again and again – speed and integrity.

Blazing fast text helps. A few years ago, variable data printing was less about putting a different jpeg on every page in line with complicated market segmentation algorithms and more about handling changing name, address, zip code, and account details in very high speed production print runs. That was our market, and we kept our eyes right on it.

We took various decisions as AFP developed and as the AFP Consortium formed around it. And one key decision was to keep on making sure AFP could deliver blazing fast text. We’ve emphasized text performance since Day One.

Now it’s true, of course, that AFP is perfectly viable with both cut sheet and continuous forms. But it certainly comes into its own most strongly and delivers its advantages most clearly in continuous form printing.

After all, if you’re doing cut sheet printing and you eject page 12 and then it takes you a little longer than expected to render the jpeg on page 13, so what? The sky doesn’t fall in on you. You just wait until it’s rendered and you image it and then you eject it.

But if you’re doing continuous form printing and that thing is running at a mile a minute, you’re going to stumble.

Fashions change, but the need’s still there

So we’ve had to make choices – sometimes hard, subtle choices. You look at how you might architect the implementation of something desirable and you think “Well, we could do it that way. That would work well.” And then you think again and you realize, “If we do that, though, it’s going to slow things right down.”

When it comes to that kind of dilemma, we have always made sure that performance is uppermost in the minds of the architects, even while we’re trying to nudge forward the limits of what AFP can do.

With 32 members ranging from Xerox, Kodak, Ricoh, Océ, HP, and Xeikon right down to some very small specialist firms, there’s no danger we’ll ever be out of touch with what the market wants and needs. We know what’s happening. We know that images are becoming more important, that variable data printing has evolved more and more towards content with high artistic value. Yet there are things we’d like to do in this area that we are reluctant to build into AFP because they conflict with our high-speed performance goals.

Ultimately, as the industry stands today, there is a large body of customers for whom high speed and low production costs are the priorities. It’s a market niche, but it’s a substantial one and it includes some pretty important companies that play a big part in everybody’s lives. Whatever else we do to broaden AFP’s appeal and refine its capabilities, this is our core user group and we’re dedicated to giving them what they need.      

Attendees at the 10th meeting of the AFPC in Boulder on March 12, 2008.

Join me over the next few months as I share more about:

• the history of AFP;
• the work of the AFPC;
• the AFPC members, and;
• the business value the AFPC delivers to the global print and mail industry.
  

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I also look forward to your joining the conversation using the comments section below.

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Regards,

Harry