Switching from Planet Press Production to Connect

OL Connect Professional General
1

Hello

Recently been pitched the idea of moving to Connect from Planet Press Production and looking for any feedback about Connect.

  1. What were some difficulties moving to Connect from Planet Press?

  2. If you didn’t know HTML did you find it challenging adjusting PressTalk/Conditions into to Connect?

  3. Any additional challenges you found using Connect where Planet Press was able to handle?

  4. How do you like Connect overall?

Thank you for taking the time for any feedback.

2

Well I can’t give you my unbiased opinion about Connect since I’m one of its Product Managers… but I can give you a bit of information that you may find useful. Hopefully, other users will be able to share their experience as well.

  • In moving from PPress to Connect, you shouldn’t plan on converting everything at once. You can still use your current PPress templates and processes with Connect, so you are in no hurry to convert. I would recommend you keep all your current PPress resources as they are now (I am assuming they are all working reasonably well !) and start exploring the Connect ecosystem with a brand new project. Alternatively, if one of your PPress templates/documents is fairly simple and needs immediate change, or if one of them is causing you pains, you could use that one to help you get started with Connect. Once you’re comfortable with it, pick another existing template and upgrade it… and so on. This gradual approach will not only be less stressful for you but will also comfort the stakeholders in your organization in knowing that the rest of your stuff still runs as it did before.
  • The most challenging part of moving from PPress to Connect, in my mind, comes from the different design philosophy. We’ve found that new users become comfortable with Connect much more quickly than current PPress users do, because they are unburdened by the PPress paradigm: in PPress, you did everything from inside the template (extract data, generate metadata, create conditions, set your finishing options, etc.). In Connect, these tasks are separate ones, which allows you to better fine tune each of them instead of having this melting pot of operations inside a single resource. For instance, using Connect’s DataMapper lets you create a uniform data model; the template therefore no longer needs to understand XML or PDF or CSV: it just accesses that data model the same way, in all templates.
  • PressTalk was a powerful language… for its time. It’s no secret that if JavaScript had been around when we initially created PPTalk, we would have used it instead of creating our own proprietary language. (To be honest, it DID exist back in 1999, but it wasn’t close to being as mature and as widely distributed and tested as it is nowadays). Using JavaScript in Connect has one huge advantage: there are literally millions of pages on the Web that will guide you through any kind of algorithm, function, or method you’ll ever need. So you’re benefitting from the experience of a slew of users, even if they have no specific experience in generating variable data documents.
  • Go through our online demos, videos and articles. They are a great source of information that you can watch or read at your own pace. Register to the Connect Forums (which you obviously did!) to see what kind of questions people are asking. Like any large scale system, Connect would be a beast if you had to learn it all by yourself without any help. But we continually try to provide as much information and resources as possible to help you move along in your learning experience.
  • Lastly, keep an open mind. If you can’t immediately do something in Connect that you could previously do in PPress, it certainly doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It simply means it should be done differently - and most likely better! - in Connect.

I hope this doesn’t sound too much like a sales pitch, because it isn’t. Moving from one system to another is always a challenge and it’s almost a certainty that at some point, you’ll find that some seemingly mundane task takes so much longer to accomplish in Connect than it did in PPress, which can become frustrating. And then you’ll discover how to do it quickly and properly in Connect and move on to the next challenge.

But I believe if you start with the above guidelines, you’ll be just fine.

3

1. What were some difficulties moving to Connect from Planet Press?
Template redesign is by far the biggest hurdle I’ve experienced. In some ways it’s helped me to think of Connect not as an “upgrade”, but as a replacement. On the template design side it has to do things very differently because it’s much more flexible than V7. Connect is not “document centric” like V7 is. Connect is all about styling HTML and putting a final “presentation layer” (i.e. context) on top of it whether it’s Print (print/PDF), Email, Web or Mobile (COTG). So it can do quite a bit more in terms of sending information in different contexts, but the trade off is it isn’t as easy to design traditional print based templates (at least in my opinion).

2. If you didn’t know HTML did you find it challenging adjusting PressTalk/Conditions into to Connect?
Yes, Connect has a steeper learning curve if you don’t know HTML. As far as coding differences it really depends on what the Presstalk was doing. Just about anything related to data overflow is much easier to do in Connect. Other things (like object positioning) are more challenging. Often in V7 you could get by with none or very little “coding”. The V7 UI was mature enough to give you just about all you needed to get most design tasks done, but in Connect you have to do “coding” for just about everything. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you just get used to switching over to the Source view and editing the HTML to get done what you need. You will absolutely need to know HTML/CSS and JavaScript. But, as Phil said, there’s a quajillion resources on the interwebs to figure out how to do what you need in HTML. You just have to sift through it all!

3. Any additional challenges you found using Connect where Planet Press was able to handle?
For traditional document based projects Connect takes longer to develop templates in than V7. In V7 you layout the data directly on a page with graphic elements and you’re done. Connect requires a data model and form template to complete the design. There are good reasons for this, but it just takes more effort to design (though there are some exceptions to this like overflow design and whitespace management).
Connect is maturing quickly and it doesn’t have context sensitive help in the app yet which can be annoying. Also I’ve found too that some of the help explains how things used to work in 1.2 or 1.5 (or whatever), but not how they work in the current version. (I found this particularly to be the case with Dynamic tables, the step by step instructions no longer fit the UI in the newest 1.8 version) With that said, if you just bookmark the Connect help site and search it, it works well enough.

4. How do you like Connect overall?
It takes getting used to coming from a print only perspective, but it’s easy to get excited about all the other web and mobile related things it can do! Again, if I think of it less as “PlanetPress Version 8” and more of “OL Connect Version 1” it’s easier to see its benefits and not get frustrated about its differences. Connect is a “revolutionary” change not an “evolutionary” one. It’s a powerful version 1 product that’s rapidly getting better and better.