CIM In Action -- Awaiting the Big Payoff

Open standards seem to be a sore spot for some users, including Wells. "What is frustrating for me, as a whole, is everyone claiming to use open standards and saying we're JDF compliant," he says. "What I find is that within their workflow, everything is using, say the PrintTalk JDF standard or CIP4 standard. But on the front or back of the workflow, or in between, you just can't feed in a JDF/PrintTalk-compliant file that was generated somewhere else and have the system actually pick it up and send it through. I think it's a bit misleading. It's all compliant in the middle, but it's not open on the front or on the back."