Upgrade Prinergy?

[bvbayer]

We are considering upgrading our Pre-Press workflow from Prinergy 5.1 to the latest version of Prinergy, not sure if it is 6 or 7. Our current hardware does not support the newer version so we would have to upgrade that as well. Any thoughts or suggestions? Is the current version backwards compatible to what we are using now? We are a commercial sheetfed printer, all of our imposing is done through Preps 5.3.3 and Preps is now incorporated into the newer Prinegy. Would our existing templates and marks be useable?

 

[Joe]

The latest is Prinergy 6.1.2. Version 7 has been announced but is not available yet and I'd be shocked to see it released this year.

Prinergy 6.1.2 comes with Preps 7.x, Your old templates and marks will work once converted to Prinergy 7 templates. They have the migration utility with Preps 7 that will do this and I think it will convert old static marks to Smart Marks also. If you have templates that contain more than one imposition you will want to convert them so each template file only contains one imposition or you will have to work really hard to use them that way. Kodak at one time had a script that would extract each imposition from a template into separate template files. I had the script at one time but don't any longer. You would have to ask Kodak if that is available. Preps is still a separate application for modifying and creating new templates but you can impose directly within Prinergy with the Signature Selection tool...which you can do in your version of Prinergy also.

 

[deverard]

Joe - don't be shocked....Prinergy 7.0 was released on April 30th. InSite 7.0 (all HTML5) was just released May 25th.

- Dan

 

[Joe]

Yes, released to Early Production. Not 100% guaranteed of getting it at this point. Plus we found that the Dell PE 2900's that we have are not qualified to run either Prinergy 7 or Insite 7 so it will require a server upgrade for us.

 

[zoran]

Joe, I was told by Kodak rep that we should upgrade from Prinergy 5.2 to latest version only if we get training as well, since interface and how everything works is changed significantly.
Is there merit to this and how easy is to migrate, learn new interface?
Thanks

 

[Joe]

Prinergy 6 introduced Workspace which is what Kodak thought would be better than Workspace. Unfortunately at first, it did not work at all. It kind of works now but not well. We still use Workshop and not Workspace so training would be beneficial if you plan on using Workspace but Workshop is identical to what it was is Prinergy 5.

From the webinar I watched on Prinergy 7 Workshop seems to look the same. I already use Preps 7 and it isn't much different than Preps 6. The latest Preps 7 (7.1.3 I think) brings back a feature of Preps 5 where you can view both the front and back of your imposition together instead of having to toggle back and forth between them. You can also view multiple webs, both front and back, in the same window. If you have never used Preps 6 though training would be beneficial as Preps 6 is whole different animal than Preps 5.

 

[zoran]

Great, thanks.
We were stuck on Preps 5 than we switched to Signa Station.
We would certainly have to get training for Preps 7.