Print Mail vs. PrintShop Mail

Never seen Print Mail, have used PrintShop Mail it is okay. The one I believe is the best in VDP market is PlanetPress by Objetif Lune. You can download copy from website.

Yes, we sell PlanetPress too. I prefer to place that in more high-volume, transactional situations or where more robust output (fax/e-mail/archive) is required. PrintShop Mail in my opinion is the better choice for promotional marketing; I find it more nimble than PlanetPress's design tool.

Now that Objectif Lune owns both, they are doing a little bit of positioning and differentiation. There is an offering summary comparing the two at http://www.objectiflune.com/resellers/us/resources.htm.

So, Ricoh and PrintMail: My initial impression of studying its literature is that PrintMail looks like a higher-powered version of a Word mail merge. It appears to heavily rely on templates and I don't see anything in it to allow for variable images. PrintMail appears to be a Ricoh-developed product just out the door, while PrintShop Mail is an established product with a good international reputation and solid support.

I am wondering if it is worth my time to evaluate PrintMail any further with PrintShop Mail already in our product line-up. Anyone out there who has used both who can weigh in on this?

(Just wanted to edit my message to say that after studying the webinar and Bob's Hardware site, I did see support for "dynamic images" but it's considered an advanced feature and in my opinion a bit down-played by Ricoh. The how-to also is more complex than I expected in a product seemingly positioned for average Office users.)

Shaja:

So, in your opinion is Print Mail "user friendly" for the casual sales rep (may only have the opportunity to quote a few each Month) and the end user?

Or could it be a headache to sell and support for the novices.

Art

Docusultant,

I'm not sure what to think of PrintMail yet, and that's why I thought hearing from people who have used both PrintMail and PrintShop Mail would be informative.

I will say that some of the functions in PrintMail are more complex to perform than I would expect of an application geared toward a general Office user (the suppression of blank line feature and the dynamic image feature, to name two examples).

Frankly, I am concerned about trying to teach an average Office user how to go through the steps of concatenating a user-defined field. That's more the style of Planet Press! (By comparison, to remove empty lines in PrintShop Mail, it's two mouse clicks: click on the text box and click "yes" under content in the properties pane.)

On the other hand, if the average Office user simply wants a text-only mail merge or sheet of text-only variable labels, it looks pretty simple to do in Print Mail (as long as they don't need to supress those blank lines).

Next step is to try recreating some of my PrintShop Mail projects in Print Mail to see how the features really stack up. I was hoping to get some other opinions/experiences first before doing so.

I figured since I started this topic, I owe it to everyone to wrap it up. However, I am uncomfortable posting in this discussion thread since Ricoh's PrintMail staff became active participants. I do not feel that I can be candid here any more. So, any dealers out there who were waiting for the report on my testing are welcome to contact me; my contact info is listed in my profile.

My company will be sticking with PrintShop Mail.

If you are looking for a good beginning education into VDP, download EFI's free guide "ABCs of VDP" from http://www.efi.com/promo/abcseries/.

We created this web site to be candid and tell the good and bad about a product. These are our opinions!! I approved the Print Mail people hoping they can help us all in selling more of this solution. It is to their benefit that they can read the good and the bad, and if they don't like the bad..... then they can be deleted. Please feel free to be candid on the forums, if you send me and email I can show you how to post an annonomouslly (boy did i butcher that), if that would help at some time in the future. art@p4photel.com

Art