VDP Drives Cross-Media

Serge Grichmanoff, vice president of research and development at Avant Imaging & Information Management (AIIM), tells how in the early 1990s the company’s founders took the job of creating the Toronto Real Estate Board’s listing books from a 12-day process to four days plus a day for delivery by going digital. They gave digital cameras to key real estate people, wrote the software to collect the data and printed on a fleet of Xerox DocuTechs. “That was huge,” he says. The company still writes its own software for certain applications, primarily for data processing, CRM and Web order management. For variable data and personalized URLs (PURLs) they use Darwin, Bluestream and XMPie.