ASI Whips up Tsunami

New publishing features are in the wind for ASI's Tsunami product. Printing solutions integrator All Systems Integration (ASI), Woburn, Mass., has arranged to bundle Web-based publishing tools from Pageflex Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

Mpower and Edit software products integrate with ASI's Tsunami. Adding Pageflex's tools makes Tsunami a best-of-breed publishing solution, with the best price/performance, company officials say.

Tsunami is ASI's workflow platform for virtualizing prepress functions. Pageflex's Mpower is an enterprise software program for designing and publishing Web-driven marketing communications. Pageflex's Edit is an Mpower add-on. It lets people without creative skills create documents using Mpower, Pageflex officials say.

Among the advantages promised is reduced cycle time. Pageflex's Mpower lets publishers make corrections to templates late in the production stage. Corrections are automatically synchronized between documents and a repository.

"I can reference assets in the database, which may change in the working process, and those updates will be passed to the template, so [users] don't have to change [it]," says Stephen Shinnick, VP of sales at ASI. "I can now print one to one, or one to many, knowing the correct data has gone in."

Pageflex's Edit software lets anyone fix typos and layout problems, which reduces cycle time, Shinnick says: "If I catch a typo, [I can] use the Edit tools and make the change directly, without needing Quark or a digital asset management system."

Ford Motor Co. in Germany is rolling out Pageflex's Mpower and Edit to give dealers access to custom-branded marketing materials. Instead of rolling out new campaign materials to 3,600 German dealers, Ford sends them to an Edit site.

The Web-based software lets dealers choose customized campaign materials for direct mails, marketing and signage, says David Henkel, general manager of Pageflex. "[It] gives users the feel of desktop publishing software, without the complexities of that software. [It's] a WYSIWYG experience."