Blanchard Systems, Inc.

Ad Agencies & DALiM ES

ES: Annotate, Approve and Soft-proof Documents Through Your Browser of Choice.

Take A Closer Look

DALiM ES will speed-up nearly every step of your approval process. You can upload documents into ES and easily assign complex (or simple), pre-defined workflows, complete with multi-level approvers. All project participants are automatically notified when (and only when) their interaction is needed. With no need for training, project stakeholders can collaborate remotely by securely logging into your system, where they can:


Screenshots

DALiM ES delivers efficiency and productivity - while reducing overhead.

Multi-level Approver Workflows

ES provides all the flexibility you need to set up intuitive, easy-to-use approval workflows. Whether it is individual users or larger groups, you assign each participant a role which defines their permissions in a project.

ES is flexible enough that you can make specific tools available (or unavailable) to different users, dependent on their need or role. An example would be that of a simple approver, who would have approve/reject buttons and a comments field vs. an advanced approver, who would have access to more detail oriented tools that would allow more sophisticated interaction in addition to approve/reject capabilities.


Text Correction Annotation and Tracking Tools:

ES provides powerful, yet easy-to-use tools that enable crystal clear annotation of text changes. You can extract full paragraphs to help keep "mark-ups" easy to understand. Similar to well known text editors, ES high-lights changes, showing where alterations (or corrections) have been requested. This clarifies communication among participants and accelerates native document modification by enabling copy/paste by your operators.


Proofreading Marks:

ES facilitates adding repetitive comments to your documents, by providing drag-and-drop proofreading marks that can be placed as annotations. You can use the default set of marks that comes with ES, or you can add your own custom marks with the API (Application Programming Interface) which is included.


Revision Management and Visual Compare:

ES features robust, built-in revision management, which is based on file names or, you can define a naming convention. Each uploaded document that matches the name of an existing file in the system (or by naming convention) will be handled as a new revision. You have full control whether or not a new approval procedure is required, and you can switch back to a previous revision if you like. Through the Project View interface, you can easily see: the total number of active revisions (with a preview of each); the current version; and the number of waiting revisions.


Flexible revision comparison tools provide you with the ability to visually compare two files (or revisions). You can view documents side-by-side, below-and-above, and one-over-another (with the top most version transparent). Differences can be automatically highlighted if you use the "Show Differences" option, which depicts any differences between the files with colored (or stained) pixels. All previous annotations, corrections and modifications that have been made can be easily referred to and traced.


Reporting:

The reporting capabilities of ES are unrivaled. All change requests are logged and date/time stamped. The log records who made a change request, in addition to who made changes. At any stage of a project, you can access a detailed, downloadable PDF report which contains approval information or a more detailed history that can include change requests, flight-check information, etc. You can generate reports on single or multiple files at once. The reporting features of ES empower you to bill accurately, and enables you to analyze what is happening in your organization: where your workflow strengths and weaknesses lie, etc. The reporting features of ES are indispensable.


User Management:

You define each users rights and roles with ES. You can associate them with one or more customers while restricting or granting access to specific files. When you assign a role to a user, you can specify the feature set available and even the language of the interface, adapting the system to users specific needs. You can also assign users to groups and organizations to streamline the administration of your processes.


Notification of Events:

One of the key components of ES is automatic notification, which is triggered upon project update or modification. You set up notifications based on your users subscriptions (or roles) in a project. You can have notification occur upon: document or project creation, modification and deletion of projects, page upload, page annotation, or page status change. You can choose to communicate to project stakeholders by fully-customizable email or RSS feeds — with individual notifications, or timed, 'grouped' notifications that can include multiple events.


Real Time Status Tracking:

ES features a built-in database in which all files and their meta data are constantly monitored for any changes during the approval workflow. Each stage of the project (and all involved users) are clearly presented in the user interface. Page status messages are updated in real time (waiting for approval, partially approved, pending, or rejected), Each step of your workflow is color-coded to make it easy to see job status and progress.


Metadata Search:

The cross-project search in ES provides an extensive list of file properties for fast results. Those properties are automatically indexed from available file metadata (XMP, IPTC, EXIF, and others).


Custom Job Ticket Option:

In addition to the existing metadata indexed from incoming files, the ES Custom Job Ticket Option empowers you to add more project or file specific properties — manually or automatically. You can add text extracted from a document, MIS job ticket info, preflight status and much more.


Enterprise Tracking Option:

You can set all necessary milestones and their associated deadlines in ES with The Enterprise Tracking Option. This helps all participants track the job progress, anticipate delays and reallocate resources if necessary. The dashboard view enables your users with an intuitive "to do" list, where they can manually change the status of a step (in your workflow) upon completion. Tasks like file delivery or approvals, which are entirely managed by ES itself, are updated automatically and provide you with a real time view on the status and progress of a job.


High Resolution Option:

By adding the ES HIRes Option, your reviews and approvals of documents will be made in full resolution — in perfect detail with an unlimited zoom capability. ES includes a built in color management engine (SWOP® and Fogra certified) and densitometer tools, so color can be simulated and judged accurately for different printing processes, avoiding the need for hard copy proofs


Broadcast Option:

With the ES DVL Broadcast Option, you can define the total number of pages of a print project/job and manually sort pages in their correct order. This provides you with a a better overview of a project, to identify missing pages or pages that still require approval — a virtual clipboard area is used to sort documents by simple drag & drop. Additionally, selected projects are published as an RSS stream to the DVL (DALiM ViRTUAL LIBRARY) application (Mac and Windows version available) and provides a dynamic and realistic page turning interface. Featuring zoom and full text search capabilities, it is dynamically linked to ES and can trigger approvals or link directly to the high res file in ES.


ES also provides you with:

ES enables you to plan, execute and control any aspect of media production, regardless of the final use of the output (print, web, ebook, movie, and others). It enhances productivity and efficiency while reducing overhead and expediting time-to-market.