Rubika 4.4 Improves PDF Print Workflow Software Productivity and Usability for an ROI Boost

Hello. Welcome to the overview of Rubika version 4.4 update webcast. We’re excited to bring this major upgrade to market and continue to enhance your user experience with our solutions. The topics this session covers includes a bit of historical background and an overview of Rubika then what’s new with version 4.4. Rubika is a mature solution with the large installation base that plays an important role in Solimar’s overall Chemistry solution platform.

Rubika primarily fits into areas two, three and four of the Chemistry platform related to making post-composition enhancements to your print data, optimizing the output in preparation for print and supporting the printing and finishing aspects of the overall workflow. The typical scenario is to ingest your print data and convert it to an optimized PDF file that retains the finishing information.

Once in PDF format, the files index to identify mail piece or record boundaries along with any other information that is needed to support downstream processing. This might include gathering content to include in barcodes, report data, insert or control files, integration with postal processing systems, and data optimization for supporting high-volume printing. Rubika accomplishes this by ingesting the print data in PDF format and then applying various processing capabilities based on what modules are sequenced in the configuration.

For example, adding barcodes, digital underlay and postal processing concepts to the output with the mark, underlay and address cleanse modules. In most cases, the end result of implementing Rubika is not only that your print process is made compatible and optimized for your production devices, but that your overall operation runs smoother and enables cost savings and efficiencies in other areas. Typically, you’ll see positive impact related to development resources, application onboarding time, employee satisfaction, and new revenue sources.

Now I’d like to introduce you to the sixth generation of Rubika, which is version 4.4. Rubika 4.4 continues to expand the capabilities that are built on Solimar’s expertise in various production print areas going back over 30 years. Rubika has expanded to 28 modules and tangent functionality that serves as the requirements of a large and diverse user base.

This is the sixth major release and update to Rubika that includes many enhancements with the focus on giving the interface a face lift that streamlines the user experience by organizing the setup with fewer clicks for commonly used tasks and hiding areas not commonly used in order to keep the users focused on what’s most important to them.

The simplified user interface helps make easy setup areas really easy and more complex task simpler to configure. These changes improve the overall look and feel of Rubika and will reduce training and learning time along with improving user productivity.

Here are a few examples of the simplified interface for configuration property panels. When a module step or conditional action is added, users are presented with the most commonly used setting to configure. Note that users can still access the advanced settings for all options with a simple toggle option. Here’s an example where the segments of content to include in a barcode are now displayed in a convenient table to summarize the information. The overall process tree has also been enhanced. You can now reorder steps and actions by dragging and dropping them and the individual steps, conditions and actions can be enabled or disabled by right clicking on them. This enables users to test configurations without having to run all of the steps and actions each time the changes made and makes developing new workflows from existing templates easier.

The user interface for conditional actions has also been simplified and enhanced. The criteria for a condition action is now represented in the step tree with its own selectable node, and there is now a dropdown list where you can select the predefined conditions or select a custom expression setting to compose new rules. The data import and export module wizard has also been expanded to support fixed length records and XML files. This helps simplify the set up related to the finding fields for files related to importing and exporting data for tasks like address processing and inserter control files.

Browse option fields now offer IntelliSense. This provides the predictive path completion based on characters entered and the new culture option for some fields that generate text will automatically present items such as time and currency formatted for the different languages. Aliases is a powerful feature across our products that enable users to assign simplified generic names to resources such as files, folders, and resources.

The use of Aliases makes configurations more intuitive for users and easier to migrate across your non-production and production systems. Rubika 4.4 has several enhancements related to Alias to make them more useful and easier to use. Conditional actions can be Aliased as named conditions so they can easily be reused in multiple conditional actions, logical expressions or JavaScript conditional criteria such as export and segment rules and exporting the process now includes Aliased resources by default. Processes can then be imported with their Alias resources included to other systems. The interface to select Alias files and folders has also been simplified for easier use with the browse buttons, and you can now easily convert from an existing static or dynamic file or folder to an Alias resource with prompts to guide users through the process.

The underlay/overlay step has been enhanced to support image files for the underlay or overlay resource to be applied to the output. The images will be rendered at the location specified and placed into a cache for reuse to make for optimized output. The scale and shift module can be used to deimpose input files. For example, taking a 2-Up document intended for a continuous feed printer and formatting the output as 1-Up. Rubika will now flag the file with an error if a page meets more than one conditional action in order to prevent duplicate pages where not intended.

There’s also a new option to reduce the input page size by applying a crop box. This can be useful when the input consists of multiple page sizes that contain margins that need to be cropped out. Rubika has over 125 available variables to control processing logic and populate content such as barcodes and exported files. Version 4.4 includes additional variables such as the dimension of crop boxes.

These can be used in steps that use conditional actions such as the mark and insert modules to compare page dimensions or direct output in step such as export. They’re also the new variables that help support piece level tracking workflows to represent the input and output values for the total mail pieces job property. For the QR barcode action, there is a new error correction level option that sets the redundancy level for QR codes to allow the barcode to be partially damaged without loss of data. For added security, the PDF encryption step now supports 256-bit encryption when setting the user password encryption level. The new suppress popup generation option in the scale and shift module can remove popup annotations which have the potential for reference pages that are not part of the output document to be included despite not being used. Removing the popups avoids the potential for significant file bloat during subsequent processing. Here are a few common questions and answers about the upgrade.

Rubika 4.4 is backward compatible so your existing configuration can be imported after updating. If you are on active support you can upgrade without any upgrade fees and it will be available from our FTP site. You can also install the update on your non-production servers to run in parallel with your production version before moving the updated into production. If you don’t have a non-production environment, now’s a great time to implement one. We hope this overview has been helpful and that Rubika continues to help fulfill your production requirements.

For the details of the update, please refer to the release notes. Thanks again for your time. Feel free to contact us any time to learn more about our overall solutions and how Rubika 4.4 can help you.