Harald Grumser: You need to understand that we’re talking about average speeds of over 2,000 pages per minute in modern, full-color printers. And that’s in large-screen resolution – about the same rendering as movie film. The main thing here is highly optimized functions, where every manufacturer first concentrates on performance. The challenge is to determine within the company what the color printing requirements are and what makes sense from a technological and business standpoint. That means getting all the stakeholders around the table – specialist departments, IT, output management – to find a suitable solution for implementing high-speed color printing. That takes a lot of effort, both organizationally and technologically.

Harald Grumser: No, I don’t think so, because there are already solutions that address the new requirements quite well. Take, for example, XML technologies that separate form and content. They just need to be properly utilized. The bigger question is a strategic one, i.e., choosing the right architecture, defining uniform formats for both processing approaches, and clearly separating business logic from document preparation for the specific recipient. That affects a company’s organizational structures, which is why the departments, management, output management, etc. need to define the document processing structures together. From a purely technical standpoint, there’s no minefield.  It’s just a question of organization.

Harald Grumser: Clearly at the instance of central output, where all documents land in their raw form. This is at the very end of the process chain, and independent of the departments. This is where the documents are formatted, modified and sent, for all physical and electronic channels.