Based in the bustling commercial heart of Paris, Compos Juliot Ltd. is a world-renowned prepress agency, specialising in photo-engraving, page setting and multimedia design. The company produces a wide range of printed materials for numerous magazines and leading tour operators, including Club Med, Jet Tours and Kuoni. Compos Juliot’s services are also called upon by many leading French publishing houses. All this makes for daunting production schedules, with the company producing anything between 6,000 and 12,000 pages per month, depending on the time of year.
Compos Juliot is one of ten subsidiaries of the SEGO Group, a large organisation with specialist knowledge of all areas of professional graphics and printing. However, among the many functions that it covers, one is considered particularly important: protecting the TIFF/IT and PDF files that pass through the company. Nowadays, less than 1 percent of Compos Juliot’s output is produced in the ‘traditional’ way, using film. The remainder of the documents processed are PDFs (up to 80 percent of the documents handled) and TIFF/IT files.
 Despite its reliance on Sun worksations to host its vast archive of digital assets, Compos Juliot is predominantly a Mac-based company — at its creative heart is a network of 38 Power Macs, which do much of the heavy lifting. Frédéric Jahn, the Deputy Managing Director responsible for SEGO Group’s development, explains: “In a somewhat depressed sector, only companies that are wholly built around a secure digital structure can achieve sustained success”. It is this fundamental belief that underpins the company’s technology choices, and — combined with its prior experience of integrating Macs into its network — convinced its technical staff to choose an Xserve-based solution to help streamline its PDF workflow.
Working with Christian Nunes, the company’s Manufacturing Manager, Christine Bierre, Compos Juliot’s Networks and Systems Administrator, recently implemented a solution comprising a dual processor Xserve running Enfocus PitStop Server 3.0 software, which certifies the many thousands of PDF documents passing through the company. This limits manual handling during the crucial production document validation phase, saving valuable time and a considerable amount of money.
Until a few months ago, all Compos Juliot’s PDF and TIFF/IT files were generated using Brisques from CreoScitex. At first glance, the Xserve might seem like a lightweight compared to the Brisques. However, Xserve’s power and flexibility should not be underestimated: to ensure that all PDF files are certified before leaving the company, the Xserve is constantly active. And Christine Bierre is delighted: “Since we’ve been running Enfocus PitStop Server with a dual processor Xserve, loaded with 2GB of RAM and Panther Server, we’ve increased our productivity threefold”. This means that a batch of 250 PDF files, comprising roughly 500MB of data, can now be processed in less than ten minutes (compared to the half hour it used to take on a Power Mac G4 running Mac OS 9.2.2).
Frédéric Jahn is also thrilled with how easy it is to use Compos Juliot’s newly-adopted solution: “We look for open solutions, based on standard products, which are simple to implement as well as being productive. There’s no doubt that this configuration meets our needs”. And, as Christian Nunes happily points out: “An effective solution like this Enfocus / Xserve combination only costs around €5000, making it significantly cheaper than dedicated proprietary solutions”.
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Compos Juliot
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Prepress Giants Streamline PDF Workflow
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Premium Service and Support Plan
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Suggested Bundle
PDF Workflow Bundle
- Dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5 with 1GB ECC Memory and 800GB of built-in storage (2x 400GB Apple Drive Modules)
- Mac OS X Server v10.4 (unlimited clients)
- Enfocus PitStop Server 3.0
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