Backstage and LabelTrax

[Prepress01]

Hello,
We are a flexo shop using DeskPack plug ins and Nexus in our Prepress department, and we use Labeltrax for our tickets, estimating, job tracking, etc.
We are considering making the jump to Backstage, combining our Labeltrax information and Deskpack functions for everything. Has anyone out there made that jump and if so would you recommend it? What are your thoughts on the process?
Currently our tickets and estimates are done in Labeltrax, a printed ticket is sent through production, we log our time in and out of Label Trax and that is it. Prepress uses Deskpack for trapping and Nexus for sending to the CDI.

Thanks!

[Wim-Esko]

Hi Prepress01,

In the US, Terry Milano leads our integrations with MIS systems, including those with our friends from Label Traxx. Terry will be able to tell you how many and with whom we already had such succesfull integrations. He can also advise how to best proceed. I heard that a queue is building up ; this is a pretty hot topic ;-)

terry.milano@esko.com


The process as you describe it is correct:
Editors or RIPs or file-automation-servers can not really integrate with an MIS ; they miss the right level of vocabulary (in databases).
Automation Engine (build on the architecture of BackStage) is the server software that can do this JDF-level of bi-directional communication that you want. And sure Automation Engine collborates with your DeskPack AI plug-ins and Nexus.

Hope this helps
best regards
Wim
wde@esko.com
bus. development MIS integrations

[prepressbb]

Prepress01
Backstage and LabelTrax
Hello,
We are a flexo shop using DeskPack plug ins and Nexus in our Prepress department, and we use Labeltrax for our tickets, estimating, job tracking, etc.
We are considering making the jump to Backstage, combining our Labeltrax information and Deskpack functions for everything. Has anyone out there made that jump and if so would you recommend it? What are your thoughts on the process?
Currently our tickets and estimates are done in Labeltrax, a printed ticket is sent through production, we log our time in and out of Label Trax and that is it. Prepress uses Deskpack for trapping and Nexus for sending to the CDI.

Thanks!



Well the only thing i can add would be that the ODBC driver to connect the two doesn't work for all information coming out of label traxx. But there is a solution for that, for special queries you export the info to a text document and use that for esko.