Across our entire Pageflex product line, we offer robust, open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow customers to extend the functionality of the base product and integrate it with other systems and workflows.
These APIs give companies with access to technical resources the ability to customize their system implementation and dynamically manipulate page composition to meet their clients’ particular needs. Customers also can hire Pageflex Services or a third-party developer to do the programming for them.
What you can achieve with an API varies with each Pageflex product, but the unique solutions that customers create with the APIs are endless. Some common uses include:
- dynamically changing the color of fonts and objects on a document-by-document basis;
- manipulating or swapping images during page composition;
- adding variable maps, intelligent bar codes, or QR codes to a document;
- enabling single sign-on so that users can log on once and seamlessly enter the web-to-print site from a corporate password-protected site; and
- integrating the web-to-print site with an MIS, asset management, data list acquisition, or inventory system.
Customer Successes
Paul O’Brien, CIO/CTO at AccuLink in North Carolina USA, is familiar with each of these APIs having used all of them at some point. He considers the APIs essential for his printing company turned marketing service provider. “Every one of our 70+ storefronts uses at least one customer extension [written using a Pageflex API] and most have multiple extensions.”
O’Brien elaborates saying, “In ecommerce, making a storefront solution meet the customer’s requirements is essential. I truly have not had to tell a customer ‘no we can't do that’. The most powerful tool I’ve built is an ActiveX/COM dll that exposes the Pageflex Storefront SINI API to VBScript. We use this for all kinds of things such as generating reports, updating product information, adding assets and address book entries, etc.”
URD Solutions, an innovative marketing organization in the province of Noord Holland, The Netherlands, use the APIs both to customize Pageflex Storefront and to integrate external user interfaces with the Pageflex composition engine. Stefan de Groot, sales and marketing manager Benelux at URD Solutions, explains that as an early user of Pageflex Storefront the APIs initially were not important to the company. “But in the last years the market grew and more solution providers started up. We have to meet the customer expectations and develop further to satisfy the market’s future requirements.”
Finally, Calvin Grucelski, digital solutions manager at The Standard Group, an integrated communications company in Pennsylvania, USA, sums the Pageflex APIs up this way, “The Pageflex Storefront API is absolutely essential to the work we do with our clients in order to meet their unique business rules.”
