Anyone have any experience or advice for connecting Kodak Prinergy Business Link to their MIS system?

Kodak has now moved all their Prinergy addons/products to monthly subscription pricing.
We had been looking into adding Colorflow with ink optimization but the initial cost had us dragging our feet.
Now they have bundle it into a monthly subscription and eliminated the upfront costs.
The bundle includes:
1 Additional High Res JTP
1 Additional Refine JTP
1 Additional Preps license
Colorflow Pro
Colorflow Pro - Ink Optimization
Rules-Based Automation
Business Link (MIS Connectivity Module)
Staccato Screening

Quote from: RMPrepress on October 18, 2022, 09:51:59 AMAnyone have any experience or advice for connecting Kodak Prinergy Business Link to their MIS system?

Kodak has now moved all their Prinergy addons/products to monthly subscription pricing.
We had been looking into adding Colorflow with ink optimization but the initial cost had us dragging our feet.
Now they have bundle it into a monthly subscription and eliminated the upfront costs.
The bundle includes:
1 Additional High Res JTP
1 Additional Refine JTP
1 Additional Preps license
Colorflow Pro
Colorflow Pro - Ink Optimization
Rules-Based Automation
Business Link (MIS Connectivity Module)
Staccato Screening

We upgraded to that plan about a year ago before I retired. We actually got 2 Additional High Res JTPs and 5 Additional Preps licenses. Maybe we got extra because we already had RBA.
But to answer your question where I worked didn't have Prinergy connected to an MIS and I'm sure they still don't. Sorry I have no info on that.

Thanks Joe.
Yeah the opposite here, we already have 5 or maybe 7 those JTP's and 5 Preps licenses so those two don't matter to much to us, although more is always good.
We don't have RBA although I hear it is very valuable to have but i can't see myself ever having the time to figure out how to put it to use.
It's really the ColorFlow and Ink Optimization and perhaps the MIS Connectivity that we are interested in.

My old workplace were wanting to try the staccato screening but I don't know if they ever tried it or not. We had only had 2 preps licenses before and were always running into the "no licenses" available so the 5 licenses + the 2 we had solved that issue. They were still using Harmony when I left so don't know if they ever tried ColorFlow. My guess is probably not.

RBA is handy but not for the faint of heart. 

colorflow is great, but it is a major server hog.
The database grows expontially every time you edit a profile.
We were using it at my previous place (quad) and we had to constantly delete old profiles and it was slow as mole-asses.

You have to set up all the printers in the network, do a ton of testing, then cross your fingers it didn't lock up when you were using it. If it did lock up, you had to reboot the server to get it back.
Also, only one user at a time can access the app.


I found myself being confused by the settings and the terminology used, lucky for me I wasn't the one they put in charge of it, I was just the admin.

Keep in mind this was several years ago, hopefully they have resolved some of those problems. 

YMMV

 

Quote from: David on October 18, 2022, 10:37:46 AMcolorflow is great, but it is a major server hog.
The database grows expontially every time you edit a profile.
We were using it at my previous place (quad) and we had to constantly delete old profiles and it was slow as mole-asses.

You have to set up all the printers in the network, do a ton of testing, then cross your fingers it didn't lock up when you were using it. If it did lock up, you had to reboot the server to get it back.
Also, only one user at a time can access the app.


I found myself being confused by the settings and the terminology used, lucky for me I wasn't the one they put in charge of it, I was just the admin.

Keep in mind this was several years ago, hopefully they have resolved some of those problems.

YMMV

Thanks for the user knowledge, I appreciate it.
We have a robust Dell Server here for Prinergy, we hardly ever see any slow downs on anything so hopefully with Colorflow that would not change things, but i totally hear what you are saying about the potential for hogging the server.
When we purchased Prinergy and Insite in 2017 we paid extra for 2x2.60 processors added in 5TB of storage.
So glad I was able to convince the owners to do that.  That server is still going strong.

Kodak sends in a color guru for 4 days to set up ColorFlow and Ink Opt.
Cost for that is $7,600, that includes profiling our 2 40 inch Heidelbergs.
Not even addressing our 2 color digital presses...yet.
Im sure its going to be a long learning curve after the initial setup.

we had a Dell as well, had Prinergy set up in a VM, ran great, one of the fastest I have worked with.


even with all the ram in the world and drive space out the wazoo, Colorflow was still a hog.

Like I said, this was a while ago, so maybe they slimmed it down by now.

We have Business Link but have not messed with it in years. We got it to connect Prinergy to our EFI front end where you could send jobs from our MIS and they would be created in Prinergy and InSite. We tried several times to get value out of it but it ended up causing more work than it saved. We even had Kodak and EFI  come for a visit, it was quicker to just build a job and then impose in Preps.

Well that's interesting information...but certainly not surprising.
Is that with EFI Pace?   We use Pace here.
Both parties say the connection between the two is more worthwhile now...

We have EFI Pace with MDSF. We also have Kodak Prinergy with RBA and Harmony (we have ColorFlow and have been trained but it is overkill for us since we already have an ink optimize solution, and Harmony is WAY easier). And we have Alwan ColorHub for GCR and ink usage. All of these run on VMs and we no longer run into server slow downs. Plus they are so much easier to manage.

We used to have InSite and BusinessLink on physical Dell servers. InSite was back when it was Java based and our customers had a hard time working with it. And since we work with a lot of small customers it really didn't make sense in the end. And BusinessLink didn't give us all we were hoping for either. The problem with that is we were creating jobs in Prinergy multiple ways by the time we started with BusinessLink. We were bringing in jobs via RBA and having Prepress manually creating them. Not that it couldn't be worked out. It's just that we had already found a good workflow for us. And BusinessLink just muddied the waters.