EskoArtwork to Integrate Nexus and BackStage

GENT, Belgium—At Graph Expo, EskoArtwork will announce the integration of BackStage and Nexus, which will allow users of the Nexus automatic workflow system to tap into the extensive job management capabilities of BackStage.

“The integration of Nexus and BackStage creates an exciting new level of modularity and flexibility for customers, who now have a clear growth path with many product possibilities,” explains Jan Ruysschaert, EskoArtwork vice president sales & marketing commercial printing. “Our customers and prospects both understand that this creates exceptional benefits—for example, the ability to coordinate multiple output devices, improved color management and proofing, more powerful impositioning workflows and most importantly better abilities to let people, departments and systems work together. This integration confirms EskoArtwork’s vision on saving time and money and reducing error rates.”

Printers and prepress companies use Nexus very successfully as an automation tool for prepress operations, processing PDF files of single pages, labels, and packages. The integration with BackStage now allows them to run, control and monitor any Nexus workflow, no matter on what server it runs or how complex it is, from within BackStage. Thus, Nexus customers can take advantage of all the benefits of a BackStage workflow without losing any Nexus features. With just a simple installation and configuration, all the expertise gained from working in a familiar Nexus environment continues to serve current users, and becomes available to a new, broader set of users. Reversely, the full set of ArtPro automation features previously only available in Nexus Processor become now available in BackStage.

“When Esko merged with Artwork Systems a year ago, we promised our user base that we would protect the investments they had made in our solutions,” states Ruysschaert. “We believe our customers’ loyalty has been rewarded with access to the most extensive list of prepress and print production tools in the industry “More important, this growth path does not require our customers to completely change their processes or re-train all of their prepress operators. Because they are already familiar with their applications and are just expanding the ‘tool set’, it is a very straightforward integration with minimal overhead for operations during implementation.”