Evaluating Web to Print Vendors
Fortunately there isn’t much talk about building web to print solutions in-house anymore. Now the talk is about how to best select a web to print vendor. There are endless comparisons of technology solutions – mostly at the feature level. The feature lists keep getting longer and the number of “yes” for each vendor continues to rise. Obviously, the solutions are becoming more feature rich, does that necessarily equate to more value to the printer? The software industry outside of print is going in the other direction – less is more. Feature rich often translates to crazy complex. I remember endless product management battles discussing new features, my line was always – “if we add it we have to test it, document it, translate it, and maintain it for every upgrade forever” (are we sure we need it?) When your strategy is more features always = better, you end up with software bloat, an unwieldy collection of features that mystifies everyone but the one guy whose been working on the product all his life (not a big target market).
Take a look at how the product managers at GMail view their jobs? Their entire focus is on preventing feature bloat / blocking a majority of the requests.
A successful web to print solution means your customers adopted the solution and your business is growing because its easier to interact with you! Ease of use is required before any other feature because without customer adoption, there is no ROI, and there is nobody using all those cool features. What if vendors starting applying engineering resources to make existing features easier and printers respected a vendors decision when they choose NOT to add the feature that notifies the mother in law of the owner via fax when a job is late.
