Meet other people who work with products from the Adobe Creative Suite, have some drinks and nibbles and listen to Murray Miskelly from Fuji Xerox speaking about Variable Data Printing and Image Personalisation.

One of the main areas in the growth of digital printing is the realm of Variable Data printing. This is where each of the documents or pages produced have a different message or composition.

While this can be done with the built-in tools of InDesign it is far more efficient to employ a specific VDP program to accomplish this. Currently the market leader is a range of products from a company called XMPie. Their offerings range from plug-ins to InDesign, through plug-ins for Dreamweaver, and automated links into both Photoshop and Illustrator. Now the designer can have near infinite flexibility in tailoring each piece to the recipient, either for print, or indeed web pages. The integration with Photoshop and Illustrator allows images and illustrations to also be manipulated specifically for each recipient.

The work produced with these products can range from simple ‘mail-merge’ concepts, through to cross-media campaigns, where there is an integration of content across the media of print, html, email, even SMS. Murray will introduce us to the opportunities this opens.

Murray Miskelly is Business Development Manager within the Production Systems Group (PSG) at Fuji Xerox, where he's involved with working with customers showing them how to leverage the use of the systems they supply, both advanced printing engines, and the software and workflow tools that enable the required applications. 

If you haven't joined the user group yet, please check out http://groups.google.com/group/wcsug and make sure you join before the event (it's free!).