So I could have played with the new features of Prinergy 5.0 all day but being the sys admin, I had some stuff thrown on my plate. Like the email passwords for everybody expired yesterday  so the first part of my morning was spent trying to remember how to log on to the remote exchange server and reset passwords (hint: passwords for Microsoft Exchange are stored in active directory, not the Exchange snap-in console). Hey you forget this stuff. And a good part of the afternoon was part tweaking the layouts in the rebuilt print controller for the Epson. I burned about 7 feet of media trying to get the layout to rotate properly so it didn’t clip. I swear, configuring for inkjet proofers can drive you crazy.

Anyhow, enough of that, here’s an overview of what we picked up on the first day of training. Four people from the development team were nice enough to come down and see how we were doing and show some of the features. Here is a list, in no particular type of order, of what we plan to play with in version 5 and maybe integrate into our daily workflow:

1. Prinergy Dashboard: Yeah it was in version 4 but we could never get it working due to account log-on weirdness. But it’s working now and we’ll see if front-office operations finds it useful. More on this feature later.

2. Prinergy PDF File Editor: This will be a big one for us. Now Prinergy allows you to convert the PDFs to native Illustrator files so you can open them up and fix stupid design mistakes to create added value for your customers. Lots more on this one later.

3. Virtual Proofing System (VPS) is now integrated with Prinergy. This will make a lot of old-time Prinergy operators really happy, especially the book printers.

4. Disk clean-up tool. Sorta of a nice sysadmin tool that gets rid of orphan files.

5. Preps 5.3.2 has auto-ganging. We’ll probably use this one in the shop to replace our somewhat complicated way of combining different jobs on one imposition.

6. Digital Print. At present, we will have little use for this feature as we are an offset shop 100%. But it will be interesting to see how long we stay with just one offset press that looks to be fully booked until 2009.

That’s about it for now. More posts later, with screen-shots, if I ever get time to play more with the system.