P R E S S ~ R E L E A S E
Bellingham, WA August 9, 2002
Beehive Software has released the first Job Tracking System fully integrated with a secure file transfer product. Now printers, prepress companies, newspapers, engineering reprographics, and other imagesetters can provide their customers real-time status on the jobs and files the customers have transferred across the Internet for imaging. This is especially important in Beehive file transfer environments where printers process a large number of orders online. It is not uncommon for a commercial printer using Beehive file transfer to have hundreds or even thousands of online file transfer customers. One Beehive site in the UK has over 3000 online customers transferring files, several in the US have over 1000 online customers.
Beehive Job Tracking allows production people at the receiving site (typically a printing, prepress or newspaper company) to add comments and status items to the forms of received jobs. When these items are checked, email notifications may be sent to designated recipient(s) including the "Sender". The Sender and Production personnel can also view all status changes online in the form of checkboxes or comments when they open the form (if they have the appropriate "View" rights).
Production personnel may change a job's status by double-clicking on any job tracking form received in the job folder. A split browser window will open with the top part containing the customer's order form and the bottom part containing status and comment fields (access to the job status is password protected). If the production person checks-off one of the status items, or adds a comment, the central jobs database is updated immediately with that status. All comments and status items are name and date stamped with the ID of the user who performs the change. Since the job ticket follows the files around in the workflow, this is an ideal way to access/edit status and append comments in a real work environment.
Customers access all status through the Beehive file transfer Outbox where all of the jobs that the customer has sent are stored. The customer merely goes into the Beehive Outbox, selects the job they want status for and they will immediately see all checkboxes and comments associated with their job (as well as the original order form they sent with the job). If real-time notification is necessary, the production user can designate a status item as a customer notification field; then the customer will receive an email when the status is changed. By clicking on the URL in the notification email, the customer will view the status of the job.
The system administrator has the ability to create any number of status items and to determine which users or groups of users have read or write access to the status items. Beehive forms are pure html so the administrator can also design any order form or job tracking form they wish. The Beehive Job Tracking system also provides the administrator a variety of usage reports that can show activity by dates or customer.
Beehive's Shopping Carte system - Art AlaCarte integrates nicely with the Beehive Job tracking system, so customers can also automatically price and process credit cards with their orders. The Beehive Job Tracking system and Art AlaCarte run on top of the Beehive SSL-Secure File transfer Appliance which contains all of the Beehive file transfer clients for Macintosh, Windows and browser users.
Beehive (including it's private label versions) is the most widely installed, standards-based, file transfer software in the printing, prepress and newspaper industries with over 1000 site licenses and 20,000 end users. Beehive is private labeled under several names including File Transfer Central by RR Donnelley, PipLink by PIP Printing, X2X by GloablX Technologies and ReproNet by Service Point. Beehive also runs at most Gannett newspapers.