7.4

Table Of Contents
Understanding PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools
PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools are input driven applications designed to output data in a variety of ways through diverse
means to various applications and devices. PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools can be used as simple go betweens, passing
along input data to output devices, but it can also perform various types of data processing.
This chapter explains how you can combine the various PlanetPress Workflow Tools services to set up versatile automated
processes to print jobs as well as generate other types of output.
The Nature of PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools
The PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools act as sorts of dispatchers. On the one hand, they retrieves data and controls plugins
that retrieve data from watched locations, and on the other hand they send data and controls plugins that send data to various
devices, for printing or to generate documents that can then be emailed or faxed. PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools can also
perform a variety of operations on the data using its action plugins.
In fact, the PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools plugin based architecture enables almost limitless customization. You can create
or purchase compatible plugins, drop them in any of the PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools plugin folder and use them to per-
form other operations. You can even find free unsupported plugins on the Objectif Lune Web site.
PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools are service applications, or if you will, applications that continuously run on a given com-
puter and that perform actions automatically. Those actions are defined in a PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools configuration.
To create and manage PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools configurations, you use one of three possible applications called Plan-
etPress Watch Configuration, PlanetPress Office Configuration and PlanetPress Production Configuration. A given computer
can only run one PlanetPress Suite configuration at a time. The PlanetPress Suite Service Console may be used to monitor the
services running on a given computer.
The Three Flavors of the PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools
The term Workflow Tools is a general name that includes all three flavors of the tools:
l PlanetPress Watch
l PlanetPress Office
l PlanetPress Production
To view an explanation of the Workflow Tools and their different flavors, please see the following PDFdocument:
http://www.objectiflune.com/OL/lib/en-CA/Documents/Brochure/OL-PPS-DSWORKFLOW.pdf
Throughout this document, unless we are referring to a specific version of the Workflow Tools, we will always use the term
Workflow Tools.
Terms and Definitions
The following terms and definitions will be used throughout this help file. We invite you to get familiar with them to simplify the
understanding of the documentation.
Understanding PlanetPress Suite Workflow Tools