Has Anyone Integrated Enfocus Switch with Kodak Prinergy/Insite?

[Stratosphere]

Hi everyone,

I'm Stratoshpere – don’t mind the typo in the name! I’m a prepress specialist currently exploring automation solutions to streamline our workflows.

I wanted to ask if anyone here has hands-on experience automating Kodak Prinergy and Insite using Enfocus Switch. I’m particularly interested in understanding how well Switch integrates with these systems.

In your opinion, is Prinergy RBA sufficient for handling automation challenges, or would Enfocus Switch be a more powerful and flexible solution in the long run?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!

Thanks in advance.

 

[cementary]

Prinergy RBA has one killer feature - full support for VB.NET

With it you can do literally any automation you could possibly wish for.
Reading from SQL server database for example is implemented via standard libraries, which is useful when you need to grab data from you MIS-system on the fly, without moving xml files all around.

For everything else there is cmd.exe support with which you can call any app, custom or not, do something and correctly process result.

So, why Switch, when you have everything you could possibly need in RBA?

 

[loicaigon]

Why Switch? Because it's I think a more widely accessible automated workflow design solution. As I did programming in the past, I know value of coding but not every prepress operator or manager is a programmer.
There is an interesting Enfocus Forum thread that elaborates on Switch working with Prinergy:

Switch integrated with Prinergy - Enfocus Community

It seems to indicate that you can connect Prinergy using hotfolders and a XML generated file. Note that the Enfocus AppStore, while already rich of about 300 connectors, keeps on growing. So you could have such a Prinergy connector anytime in the future.

 

[cementary]

Well, without base programming skills you'll end up with moving xml's all around without actually knowing what you're doing.
I dunno maybe is a printing house which business processes will benefit from pure Switch logic but from my experience there isn't. RBA is much more powerful and using Switch over it imho adds just overhead complexity

 

[Stratosphere]

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful replies and insights – really appreciate the different perspectives shared here.

If one decides to go the VB.NET and RBA route, where would you recommend starting? Would it be realistic to learn and implement on our own, or is Kodak specialist involvement usually necessary in the beginning to get things rolling?

Also, are there any practical examples or case studies available showing how RBA workflows are automated in real production environments? It would be extremely helpful to see how others structure their logic and apply automation with Prinergy.

 

[cementary]

Kodak involvement is nice, but not cheap. I think one would start with additional activity guides from workflowhelp
there was a nice guide to automate workflow starting with XML from mis-system.
While doing it - try to convert some actions to custom code, see what it is like, star using variables, try to recreate some of actions with user defined action. Explore RaiseEvent, see what you can do with cmd.exe action. Check on import section - see what functionality you can add to your code.
Find some course about vb.net on youtube to get familiar with variables, subs etc