After trying a number of industry standard solutions, Quebecor implemented Xinet WebNative Venture at each of its premedia locations to easily create customized, co-branded Web sites for clients in the magazine, catalog, book, direct mail and commercial print markets.

Now Quebecor delivers its services globally from a North American presence, reaching into previously untapped markets. The company's overseas publishing partners now view and share their assets via the Internet, sharing their digital assets internationally, from remote locations throughout Europe, Asia and South America.

"WebNative reinvented how Quebecor World does business and how we interact with our clients. Being able to re-deploy our digital assets on a global arena is definitely the way to go especially since we are a global company," said Scott Pellicone, Director of Business Development, Quebecor World Premedia.

“We have had the opportunity to experiment with a number of different applications which pretty much run the gamut from digital asset and content management through workflow and electronic delivery, and there is nothing on the market better than WebNative for interfacing with your customers,” explained Pellicone. “WebNative is real-time, with images available immediately, whereby other Web-based systems are extremely dependent on their databases to operate, are cumbersome to use, and are not easily customized.”

Triggers and Actions
Quebecor World further automated their workflow by embracing the Triggers and Actions feature of the WebNative Venture database. With Triggers and Actions, any change to metadata values in the database can set off one or more actions, such as automated e-mail notification, final output generation and archiving, to name a few. Anything from file delivery to digital rights management and image expiration can be scripted using this clever feature.

“The beauty of Triggers and Actions is that you can do almost anything to the file system,” said Pellicone. “Triggers
and Actions enable Quebecor to share our technology resources across our printing and premedia platforms, to level work loads, to work remotely, and allows our customers to work remotely as well. It is also a huge factor in our business interruption and disaster recovery plan.

If we cannot access a building, we can still access the files and deliver them to other plants that run a parallel workflow.”

Reduce Labor, Reinvent Business
“Quebecor has lowered its labor costs by using WebNative to leverage employees from its different plants during peak busy times. We staff for the valleys, and handle the peaks by deploying labor from other plants using WebNative. We stay lean that way,” Pellicone said.

WebNative’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to transcend language and time zone barriers, according to Pellicone, who has used WebNative to create branded Web sites for clients in each market segment.

“For magazine and catalog clients, we may display their digital assets in one fashion, while for commercial and retail, we may need to present their data in another way entirely,” Pellicone explained. “Further, when customers see a Web interface that is branded to their corporate identify, how can they resist? Instant credibility.”

This solution creates a seamless collaborative workflow that reaches across the continent and globe. For example, Quebecor can do image capture in New York, color and retouching in Los Angeles, page assembly in St. Louis, and finally proof the files back in New York, where the customer is located.

“It doesn’t make sense to ship high resolution data all over the country when everyone can simply log in to WebNative from any browser and access the work in progress remotely,” Pellicone said.