Working from home?

rin

Member
Is there anyone out there who is set up to do prepress jobs from home? Our prepress department would like to allow each person one day a week to work from home via timbuktu. The ones at work would do the leg work involved...loading plates etc., but the one working at home would log in and do all the necessary prepress computer work and send the finalized pdf file in to be processed. I was just wondering if there are any shops who are doing this kind of thing.
 
Re: Working from home?

Uhmm, where do you work? Need some help? 18 years prepress...
Seriously. That is the most innovative thing I have heard of a company
doing in awhile.
As the manager I login and output plates. Also, now, with 10.5
I log in using "share screen" and run my 10 gig of Ram Pro Tower
from my house. Pretty sweet.
I would look into share screen if I were you
 
Re: Working from home?

> {quote:title=rin wrote:}{quote}
> Is there anyone out there who is set up to do prepress jobs from home? Our prepress department would like to allow each person one day a week to work from home via timbuktu. The ones at work would do the leg work involved...loading plates etc., but the one working at home would log in and do all the necessary prepress computer work and send the finalized pdf file in to be processed. I was just wondering if there are any shops who are doing this kind of thing.



I use Apple Remote Desktop to login and do some things so I don't have to drive 35 miles back to work. We have DSL and believe me it's not something I'd want to attempt to do for 8 hours. It's great for quick fixes but I would not want to work via ARD for an extended period. (Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Proofing, Plating)
 
Re: Working from home?

Agreed. However, share screen is incredible. You are simply moving your mouse in location a and
it shows up at work. No large file transfers, etc. You make a 50 meg pdf on the desktop at work,
NOT on the desktop at home.
Chris
 
Re: Working from home?

Yeah, that is how ARD works too. The problem is the screen redraw is slow and jerky as is the mouse. Tried VNC too. Same result only buggier.
 
Re: Working from home?

I used it the other night (shared screen) for an hour. I agree, unless you have major
bandwidth I do not know if I could do it for 8 hours.
My only point is that thinking you are going to do it by just actually VPN'ing
in and double clicking on a Quark doc and opening that doc across the network
then you might want to get a big ol beer and at least enjoy your 20 minutes...
been there done that. (Soccer tournament 300 miles away with a screwed up job
and me, with the laptop.....)
 
Re: Working from home?

I can't work from home. I'm an office guy. My home is not where I want to take work. It's my cave. I've done other stuff and tried to work from home. I didn't like it. It's not my cup of expresso.

To be able to fix a file, give advice, answer questions, no problem. To spend 12 hours at home, "Working", I shudder.

Frank
 
Re: Working from home?

We tried it with Timbuktu. It was very slow and jerky, but we thought perhaps we had set it up wrong and was going to investigate further. Has anybody got it working smoothly? It would be great to be able to get this working.
 
Re: Working from home?

Timbuktu was problematic trying to get it to communicate over various operating systems (an OSX machine to an OS9, for example). Not unsolvable I don't think but we gave up. Currently have a satellite plant connecting remotely via Citrix to a PC here with Prinergy Workshop loaded. It seems to work well - all file processing is here and they just deal with the less than fast screen refresh, but it's not unmanageable. Internet speed bottlenecks are 1) file uploading and 2) 1-bit tiff downloads for proofing. While uploading or downloading they can be doing something else - Prinergy, Workshop, Preps, VPS all operate well with this workflow.
 
Re: Working from home?

Good luck. High speed internet is still a lot slower than your LAN speed and it's still slow and jerky over the LAN.
 
Re: Working from home?

Sounds like a great idea! Sign me up!

You should be thinking of a VPN connection and not a screen sharing or Remote connection. These are suitable for as they say remote connections to operate your computers from off site. Great for that and helping out when things go wrong. The VPN connection will allow you to connect to your office network from a remote location. Using the local computer as if it was on the remote site. You can then mount your server shares at home and load up you home computer with all the software from teh office. You might have to do some additional network congfig for your prepress workflow. Having very hi speed internet connections will make all this work much better.

Good luck!!
 
Re: Working from home?

> {quote:title=prepressguru wrote:}{quote}
> Sounds like a great idea! Sign me up!
>
> You should be thinking of a VPN connection and not a screen sharing or Remote connection. These are suitable for as they say remote connections to operate your computers from off site. Great for that and helping out when things go wrong. The VPN connection will allow you to connect to your office network from a remote location. Using the local computer as if it was on the remote site. You can then mount your server shares at home and load up you home computer with all the software from teh office. You might have to do some additional network congfig for your prepress workflow. Having very hi speed internet connections will make all this work much better.
>
> Good luck!!


Yeah, I think trying to do remote access with the GUI would be too slow. Copy the files to home and work them from there. Then copy back for submission to workflow, proofing, plating etc...

The downside is licensing the software at home for each user.
 
Re: Working from home?

FYI - As far as I know, EUL agreements for both Quark and IDCS3 now allow two separate installs.
However, machine at work cannot run at same time? Someone set me straight if I can wrong.
 
Re: Working from home?

We've just installed [Logmein|http://logmein.com] . Best thing is it's free! It's best if you select the Java option to control your desktop when working with mac. It is a bit clunky but works quite well.
 
Re: Working from home?

I am interested in this postion. I have 28 years experience in pre press supervision and would like to see what it is you are wanting to do.

I have extensive experience in Quark, Pagemaker, Freehand, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat. Also plenty of Microsoft experience with Publisher, Word, Excel and others.
 
Re: Working from home?

I do this quite often. Using ARD through the corporate VPN. Works very well and I don't have any screen redraw issues. Also check out RDC from Microsoft if you want to control any servers.
 
Re: Working from home?

I work from home 100% of the time, but am on a PC. I work with two companies. With ELAN GMK, my computer is basically a keyboard and a monitor with an Internet connection when I use Remote Desktop Connection - This then connect to a remote computer's desktop at ELAN GMK, and I run applications on that remote workstation as if you were sitting at its console - that "remote" workstation is actually an application server tricked out with two CPUs - one which is delivering 16 MBs of RAM to the applications, the other basically running (or delivering) the server hard drive space.

We are hoping to be able to offer this via Amazon Mechanical Turk to anyone and everyone interested in "hits" - anyone who wants to learn more about how we will all be doing business in the future over the internet, check out application served [SAAS apps|http://www.pdfzone.com/c/a/Authoring/Photoalbumcom-leverages-PDF-for-scrapbookers/] like they offer online at [PhotoAlbum|http://www.photoalbum.com] and look to [Amazon Mechanical Turk|http://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=whatis] as the new method of offering and contracting remote work.

Related to Magicomm.biz, well, we feel you need more than simple FTP - if you agree that you need more than some server to download and upload files to - we use [Basecamp |http://www.basecamphq.com/] as a project management server. We also use [Adobe Acrobat Connect|http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnect/] -- and am testing [Adobe Brio|http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/brio/] -- to go over projects and for our screen share with customers. As I often work with customers out of the country, we make use of [Skype|http://www.skype.com/] to avoid the cost of international long distance phone rates.

Hope that helps !
 
Re: Working from home?

Go to work. It's good for the soul. When your home, be home. We go home from work so we can stop working.

This is a double edged sword. Once The Man realizes you don't have to be on location to do prepress, it'll be a short leap to having it done in Bangladesh by people who make $10/day or clearing houses that can do the work for next to nothing because of economies of scale. It's being done. The more the "workflow" does all the thinking the less valuable all us finicky, family supporting, health insurance needing, expensive brainiaks become. There's not many people who can effectively do all the tasks required to take a computer graphic from pretty picture to separated tools quickly and without error. There's lots of people that can drop a PDF on a workflow. Don't get me started on PDF!!! PDFwas supposed to be "portable". Simple, small. I'll stick with what I said back in '99. In order for PDF to become capable of handling all the complexities of modern color separated image rendering, it will have become PostScript.

Technologically speaking you've got to think about what you're doing with ARD and all these other remote control gadgets. Your taking a whole bunch of processes that are normally handled on the incredibly fast system bus, packing them up in packets with a lot of overhead, sending on a broadband wire and then dishing them back out. Even a LAN is slow compared to what goes on in the box. Sure, these tools are great for the emergencies and on occasion, but it's no way to work long term. Hell, you're running two computers to do a task that one should do. From the point of the employers it's no big deal if they don't have to pay for the home machine or the broadband, and, if you're salary, why not have you work 40 in the office and another 40 at home!! Software licensing can be managed for the box apps., for now, but I suspect if dual installation becomes more of a business practice they'll put the brakes on it.

To answer the question directly.... We do have people work from home but have found it to be far more reliable and efficient to have them truly work locally and send the final output file either directly to a TCP/IP "printer" routed through the firewall, or dump the AI or PDF in a folder for final output after soft proof. With a T1 at the company and Fios at home it's bearable. None of these methods are preferable to having a body on site but they have helped smooth out situations like Maternity Leave and such.
 
Re: Working from home?

You have a really old school way of thinking. We run a 100% PDF workflow and we don't convert to PostScript. It's 2008 now, not 1999. Guess what... I also sometimes work from home (gasp) with no problems.
 
Re: Working from home?

We have some employees that work entirely from home for various reasons. Sometimes I do as well. We use a VPN, but it is definitely slow for uploads and downloads. I would still rather use it than a remote desktop however. I couldn't deal with a computer moving slower than it should. Skype is very helpful for communicating with remote users. We also use it to communicate with business partners, customers and people at the other end of the office when you don't feel like getting up. I would want people in the office most of the time, but I think you have a great idea. The company that treats its employees the best is going to have the best employees.
 

PressWise

A 30-day Fix for Managed Chaos

As any print professional knows, printing can be managed chaos. Software that solves multiple problems and provides measurable and monetizable value has a direct impact on the bottom-line.

“We reduced order entry costs by about 40%.” Significant savings in a shop that turns about 500 jobs a month.


Learn how…….

   
Back
Top