COMPUTER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS -- The MISsing Link

Within the graphic arts community, digital integration had been thought of mostly in terms of production workflows until recently. Now there's starting to be more talk about linking production and business management systems as part of a database-driven operation. Various efforts to establish standards—such as ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), JDF (Job Definition Format) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language)—are helping to enable the passing of data to/from various system components.