In-plant Events

From all over the South—and beyond—university printing managers came together to share ideas and learn from each other. With a large dose of Southern hospitality, Auburn University recently welcomed the 23rd annual Southeastern University Printing and Duplicating Managers Conference to its Auburn, Ala., campus. Despite his Midwestern roots, Auburn Printing Service Director Harv Dahl had no trouble providing a warm Southern welcome to the more than 40 attendees, whose ranks were slightly lower than expected due to the approach of Hurricane Georges, which kept almost a dozen managers home. One of the most helpful sessions featured a panel of managers discussing their

Cloudy skies did not obscure the illumination coming from the many educational sessions at the IPMA 98 conference, which drew 620 people.

The show was built around a trio of themes: personalization, the Internet and outsourcing. This last theme, however, may have proved a bit overbearing. As Barbara Pellow put it in the opening minutes of the 1998 On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Strategy Conference and Exposition, "The digital opportunity isn't coming; it's here, it's today and it's now." Certainly that was not headline news to printers, who have been hearing about—and practicing—printing on demand for years. Nevertheless, more than 18,700 people jammed the Javits Convention Center in New York recently to learn about the latest print-on-demand developments. Pello's consulting firm, CAP Ventures, the

This year's meeting was a Major League event. One of the most well-attended ACUP conferences to date, it even drew three attendees from England. It was a conference where laughter was a scheduled event, foreign accents spiced up the air and cutthroat betting on autographed basketballs soared into the millions of dollars—all in a city known mostly for baseball bats and horse racing. With a louder than usual roar, the annual Association of College and University Printers (ACUP) conference landed in Louisville, Ky., recently, its record 150 attendees waking up the quiet Ohio River town. Dozens of new schools were represented this

Are in-plants obsolete? The folks in charge of the 1998 On Demand Digital Printing & Publishing Strategy Conference seemed to want the world to think so. I attended this five-year-old event last month and was upset to hear a not-so-subtle message being repeatedly stressed to attendees: outsource your printing. Right from the opening keynote session, outsourcing was glorified. If you listened to speakers Frank Casale, of The Outsourcing Institute, and John Stuart, CEO of IKON Office Solutions, you would have thought that sending all printing to an outsourcing firm was the only viable path for a company to take. And that's

Dallas was cold, but the topics were hot at Xplor's 18th annual document systems conference. Have you gotten any advertising postcards in the mail lately? Any brochures or newsletters? Bet you have. And I bet you tossed some of them with barely a glance. But what if, during that glance, you spotted your name? And what if, instead of useless, generic topics, the copy was about one of your main interests? You'd read it, wouldn't you? We're talking about targeted marketing, using variable data. It's nothing new. Nothing profound. But it may be something you hadn't thought your shop could provide.