For many graphic design teams, catalog production requires a lot of effort that isn’t design. They spend hours copying and pasting from Excel spreadsheets to update product information, manually trawling through network drives looking for images, and chasing down colleagues to get final pricing or approvals.
Creating an Efficient Catalog Production Process
Give Designers the Power
The Agility Connector for InDesign allows designers to spend their time on design versus data search. This direct link from Agility PIM to the InDesign application puts the power of the PIM in the hands of the designer. Aligned to the latest Creative Cloud versions, the Agility Connector allows designers to work in their preferred tool while benefitting from access to current, consistent, and approved product information.
While the connection to PIM data is direct, the designer maintains discretion and control, choosing whether to accept updates from Agility.
Provide Powerful Tools
Smart Attributes + Scripts via the Connector provide designers with a full range of tools to paginate data from the PIM. In fact, straightforward layouts can be achieved with minimal effort from the designer after creation of the initial page template, consistent data from the PIM flows in via batch pagination.
Last-minute changes, a constant bugaboo for designers, can be identified and incorporated right up until the files are sent to print; one batch job can update all pricing, correct currency, or create a country-specific version by converting specifications from metric to imperial.
Agility PIM Connector for InDesign: Menu
With Agility, designers work within their native environment—they simply have a new Agility menu in their InDesign menu bar. This allows designers to access content within Agility PIM and easily execute batch processes, like price merges and index generation.
Agility PIM Connector InDesign: Events Palette
With the Agility Connector for InDesign, additional elements from Agility PIM are presented to users in the form of palettes, which can be docked like InDesign panels. The Events Palette allows designers to browse catalogs and other publications in Agility.
Agility PIM Connector InDesign: Built Page
A simple drag-and-drop action will flow products from the PIM to the page—fully formatted with defined paragraph and character styles. Designers don’t need to worry about mundane formatting—they can focus on the effectiveness of the design.
Agility PIM Connector InDesign: Refresh All Attributes
With the Agility PIM Connector for InDesign, your product content is not just a snapshot of a point in time. With its continual connection to the PIM database, designers can view content changes and to decide which attributes to refresh on the page.
The Value of a Custom Demonstration
Agility eagerly provides demonstrations of our software and, in a final round of deliberations, we offer a customized guided experience so you can see your own product data organized in a meaningful way. We find the self-directed sandbox experience some PIM providers offer cannot convey the scope of capabilities of an enterprise-level software package as powerful and adaptable as Agility Multichannel.
