Recent content by gabrielp

Here is a post on a free file automation framework I've been working on: https://printplanet.com/forum/information-technology/technology-help-desk/260750-antfarm-a-simple-file-automation-framework-written-in-node

Hi guys, For some time, I've been working on a little personal project to make file automation a little simpler. To summarize, you can use this to create hotfolders, download and move files to FTP or Amazon S3, and even trigger advanced workflows with HTTP requests. It's designed to be used for...

We use Google Apps for business. Made the transition about 2 years ago. It is awesome -- not a single complaint. The way it works with Drive is perfect and at $5 per user, really not that expensive.

Has anyone seen this website before? I somehow received an email from them. There are a lot of claims on that website about folks in the industry. Curious what everyone's take on it here was.

Well, I'm not sure if you can apply a style rule to a rectangle color in SmartStream. That's probably where I'd start. If you can do it, then you can make your life easier by breaking that column into 6 different columns using a tool like "text to columns" in Excel. That would mean you can avoid...

Yeah, like Stephen said, if you can share more details about your setup, the actions you'd like to perform, and examples of what you have for input -- I'm sure many of us here can show you how to automate this.

We preflight our VDP databases at all steps with data-preflight: https://github.com/shawmut/data-preflight We use a combination of Excel and BCC to do all manipulation work. With each revision, the database is tracked in a version control system which automates the creation of preflights.

Great discussion here. I figured I would chime in from another perspective because we also automate our folder creation but do so a different way which doesn't rely on any operators. We utilize Enfocus Switch for much of our automation and we use a common live jobs folder as the common...

I've heard of the Enfocus appstore. Four of those apps you see on there were created by me. Closed and open source code are both important and both have their place. Programming and automation within our industry is mostly closed, I think a little more openness would be a good thing. I don't...

It was just a flippant generalization -- nothing to take offense over. I have not installed and implemented each and every MIS. The ones I have dealt with are aged, slow, cumbersome, and very expensive to implement any custom features. Many of them are completely walled off from accessing your...

Hey Duncan, In my opinion, all print MIS' are really bad -- so pick your poison. You can learn about specific features like scheduling, data collection, and estimating scenarios and see which one suits your business (and where you aim to be in 10 years) the best, but it will certainly be a...

I think print planet adding a space for something like this, separate from its technology help desk could be a good candidate. As of now, I've started an IRC channel which is linked to a Gitter page, which allows for a different style of discussion: https://gitter.im/open-automation/Lobby And...

To make this a little more accessible, I've created a gitter chat room and linked it to the IRC channel, so you can now use either. https://gitter.im/open-automation/Lobby

I think those are fair points. But who says this is a zero-sum game? I'm arguing more for a space and willingness to discuss and collaborate on programming/automation issues within our industry, not publicizing your entire body of work or conducting all future work in the open-source space. It's...

Hi guys, I've always been frustrated with how closely technology professionals hold their cards close to their chest within our industry. Meanwhile, amazing advancements are taking place within the open source community which are frankly, leaving the printing industry and everyone in it in the...