CHILI Publish Announces XMPie Partnership

If you love CHILI Publisher (Booth 338)? and you love XMPie (Booth 1213), you can now have both together. This was the joint announcement of the two companies made Sunday afternoon in a press briefing room at The McCormick Center.

CHILI Publisher , a Belgium-based company, offers a powerful, user-friendly online document editor and 3D job visualization tool that allows both professional and nonprofessional users to access and modify templates for everything from simple business cards to complex packaging.

While CHILI Publisher can be embedded in a customer’s internal or external publishing workflow, it offers no formal workflow of its own. Partnership with XMPie gives CHILI a complete end-to-end solution. “Connector integrates CHILI Publisher capabilities into uStore-driven W2P workflows,” said Kevin Geominne, CHILI Publisher CEO. “We don’t offer the workflow portion, and XMPie has so many years of experience developing workflow solution, so for us, the partnership made a lot of sense.”

John Arnsdorf, Product Marketing Manager for XMPie, pointed out that the partnership also gives XMPie users access to the CHILI engine so their customers, including nonprofessional marketers like small business owners, franchisees, and product distributors, can create branded marketing documents using this popular and very intuitive tool.

“XMPie creates applications from video, Web-to-print, personalized URLs, and email. Now we are adding CHILI,” he says.  “Native CHILI documents will be processed through the CHILI servers and brought into XMPie as placed as part of the document solution workflow. Pricing, checkout, shipping, and invoicing will be handled by uStore.”

The integrated product will be offered in one of two ways.

• uStore/CHILI Publisher will be offered as a product bundle by XMPie.
• XMPie Connector can be sold both XMPie and CHILI Publish to uStore and CHILI Publisher customers.

Geominne stressed the value of the CHILI Publisher, not just to provide intuitive document creation and design to nonprofessional users, but also to assign different permissions and rules to different categories of users. “With a simple business card, perhaps the user might be able to change borders and resize elements, but the business rules are maintained,” he says. “Meanwhile, a more complex document might have enabled more flexibility design. Different feature sets can be enabled for a product package versus a beer label.”

Any branding and changes to business rules are made at the administrative level and will be reflected in all future documents created by CHILI users.

Another distinctive feature of CHILI Publisher is 3D previews. The CHILI presentation showed an online proof of beer label, not just laying flat as it would be displayed in most online proofing tools, but how it appears wrapped around a beer bottle. CHILI also showed an animation of the book folding up to reveal back, spine, and front views, as well as a complex packaging die being folded up into shape.

There are no immediate plans to integrate XMPie’s high-volume VDP capabilities into CHILI, although both CHILI and XMPie presenters left open the possibility of this functionality being added in the future. 

The press conference opened with a video showing a variety of users creating different marketing products ranging from product catalogs to in-store signage for a fictional brand, Spicy Beer. Therefore, Geominne concluded the presentation with the offer that any Graph Expo attendee requesting a full demonstration of CHILI Publisher will receive a bottle of beer with personalized label as a thank you.