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Adobe and Zazzle

Adobe Express Chooses Print Partner for Launch

Today, Adobe announced that you can design and order print products directly from Express. You can now order business cards, flyers, posters, even t-shirts, without leaving Express. They launched with longtime partner Zazzle. I’ve been telling Adobe to offer online editing capability for decades, so Express was a huge step forward, but they even took it one step further with integrated print and fulfillment.

 

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Didn’t they do this before? Back in 2007, Adobe put a “print” option into Acrobat, leading to a debacle, in which every print provider that wasn’t the anointed one (FedEx Kinko’s, at the time) took great offense. Imagine that you were a commercial printer, paying Adobe an arm and a leg for software over decades, when suddenly (and during a print downturn) they give your competitor an unfair advantage? It is no wonder that the “print” option went away in short order, given the instantaneous feedback.

Why This is Different

When I asked Adobe Express contacts about this, they were unanimous that we are living in a better time, where such a partnership does not hard code in a specific print provider.

“This was all built with public SDKs: anyone can do this.”

My favorite Adobe Express feature, extensibility, combined with the modern computing stack that Express and most printers use these days significantly changes the game. The fact that Express is a Web App, with one-click install of add-ons, combined with the ubiquity of RESTful APIs, makes it far easier for printers to make Express their own, and lead Express users to their services.

Express Print Add-on

Well before this Zazzle announcement, we worked with a number of organizations to integrate Express into publishing workflows. After leveraging both the Add-on SDK and the Embed SDK several times, we concur with Adobe that even small organizations can already use Express extensibility to attain a very similar outcome to this Zazzle integration.

A Level Playing Field

If you’re a print provider, you can build an Add-on that overrides the Zazzle default, directing users to your print service instead. In fact, you can do so with exactly the same SDK that Adobe used for this.

Does this level the playing field? Yes and no. Technically, you can certainly make an Express add-on or integration quite comparable. The question then becomes, “how noticeable is your add-on?” and “how can Express users find you?” Certainly Zazzle is the default vanilla option. Adobe will always have the upper hand in determining discoverability of add-ons. Yes, Zazzle still has an advantage, yet it is definitely in Adobe’s interest to keep the playing field “level enough.” Time will tell if the playing field is truly level.

A Great Opportunity

I see this as a great thing, overall. We have built countless online editing applications over the years, for printers and non-printers alike. We painstakingly mapped HTML5 and Adobe InDesign document models in order to do so, and we integrated our web front end with hundreds of systems. To us, Express is just one more editor/rendition engine, but it is extremely modern and has amazing AI and unrivaled graphic capabilities. The PDF output is wonderful, if not robust enough on its own, but the extensibility lets us leverage other engines and object models as needed, to make Express part of solutions that eclipse anything previously possible. This is a great time to be alive.

Contact us today to see how we can bring Adobe Express into your document workflows.

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