Home › Blogs › Strategy

Dynamic Product Information Publishing

Mon, 08/17/2009 - 17:42 — masterdata

Dynamic Print Publishing

Dynamic product information publishing is the new way to get product data to ecommerce websites and to print print publishingpublishing. New technogies have surpassed the older print publishing tools like Stibo. 

3 approaches to product publishing.

  • Catalog is built, automatically refreshes the catalog, little or no manual work.  PIM structures are transformed into catalogs.
  • Manual selection of products builds pages and pages are planned.
  • Drag and drop products into indesign, this process makes sense whent there is no certain landing spots where products go to. 

Desktop publishing software can do page make ups and edits, the key is where the product structures reside. It makes sense to built a standard structure, for images, and prices, and attributes. The product information structure is in a PIM system. A pim system will get the best results for ecommerce and for catalogs. ERP, does  not have the ability to add attributes. The structure of the catalog is maintained in pim solution and data is published to print and to site.

Everything that depends on product hierarchical structures sit in pim solution. Structures and content is in PIM. Rules for dynamic content creation for print and websites reside in print module in pim system. Rule definitions, like text information, product types, like brakes, will populate the right template. Rules and mappings are built once and when new items are added. Mapping is done once.

Marketing users sign in to the web based print module and always see current data. Current data from PIM triggers the generation of a product preview. Changes will refresh print view previews. Rules may be as product goes final print preview is update, or updates can be done manually per catalog. The best print solutions will tell users of a change in the PIM and ask if changes should be absorbed. 

Changes should reside and be made in PIM system.  This keeps data accurate and is the suggested best practice work flow. Product data is not maintained in layout. The publishing system can provide a list of changes to be made in the pim system. This is done by xml on build of system. 

Catalogs are managed by product managers and access monitoring and role based privileges are handled by PIM system. Projects can be assigned to various user groups. Workflow is controlled in PIM system, workflow for pages are can be done in print module. 

Design work done in Indesign is available for reuse. Importing valuable information can be loaded into PIM system. Information is tagged like field delimiters then export job is run into pim. Taking data into pim to make catalog dynamic. All quality work can be saved for reuse.