PrintingNews.com

If you are a commercial printer, you are probably thinking about (if you haven't already transitioned to) a marketing services provider model. If you are a creative, your printer is likely laying the groundwork for (if it hasn't already) getting you to recognize and appreciate its knowledge base beyond print production.

The idea is to move beyond a sterile "order print, pay when it's delivered" relationship, into a more dynamic one. In this relationship, the printer works closely with the client's creative and marketing teams, often at the earliest stages, to bring its expertise in key printing applications to improve marketing effectiveness and strategy.

Increasingly, software solutions are being developed that give small businesses the benefits of applications like Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus, but without the capital investment.

The key to success is collaboration. Unfortunately, while many small and mid-sized print shops have growing knowledge bases in Web-to-print, one-to-one marketing, transpromo, and many other high-value print applications, the collaboration part is something at which they often have little practice, and for which they are technologically unprepared.

And yet, the "printer turned marketing services provider" model works best when there are dedicated processes in place for brainstorming, file sharing, schedule-coordinating, and more. Unfortunately, the cost of collaborative solutions is traditionally out of the range of small and mid-sized businesses (LotusNotes, for example, is a $20,000 investment), and especially for printers just moving into this arena, this appears to be a "luxury" they can't afford. The result? They under-invest in an aspect of the business so critical to helping it get off the ground.

SAAS Benefits

Enter SAAS (software as a service). Increasingly, software solutions are being developed that give small businesses the benefits of applications like Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus, but without the capital investment. A good example is CatalystWeb, which released its flagship product, Catalyst Office, in January. CatalystWeb has also just become available for Mac using the Firefox browser. Price? Starting at $25 per month.

What does collaborative SAAS offer? It offers all of the features of enterprise productivity, including online document sharing and storage, business-class e-mail, companywide address books, online calendar, contacts, tasks, company or project-wide messaging, collaborative work spaces, guest user privileges, and more.

These solutions are not designed for hosting extremely large volumes of high-res files, however, so printers and creative firms are unlikely to use them as company intranets. What they do offer is a collaborative workspace. Essentially, CatalystWeb becomes a project server, with open access to everyone on the team (employees, clients, marketing partners, suppliers). Think of it as an office meeting that can occur at any time of day, with people attending whenever they want, but everyone staying on top of deadlines through coordinated scheduling.