Implementing effective workflow management is critical for a company if it is to attain — and retain — a sound competitive position. Of course, businesses also want affordable, effective and quality solutions. That’s where Enfocus PitStop Pro Floating Licences come in, offering businesses an efficiency tool designed to simplify the use of PitStop Pro in a multi-user, collaborative work environment. Using the Enfocus Workgroup Manager, managers can control the allocation of all Profiles, Action Lists and Global Changes, distribute those settings throughout a local area network and standardise all workflow throughout a group.
PitStop Pro Floating Licences with the PitStop Workgroup Manager are ideal for environments that require hands-on access to the interactive editing capabilities in PitStop Pro, but may not need every member of staff to have full time access to PitStop Pro.
Extensive workgroup functionalities within the PitStop Workgroup Manager enable businesses to centrally manage and standardise preflight and editing of PDFs in multi-user environments. You can easily share Action Lists, Preflight Profiles, Global Changes, Workspaces, colour settings, etc. or enforce them as policies throughout your organisation.
PitStop Pro is designed to operate as a standalone desktop application, but in practice it is frequently used in workgroups where people need to collaborate. This means different team members may wish to share Preflight Profiles, Action Lists, Workspaces, etc., while the team manager needs to control and standardise the settings that are used. The Workgroup Manager runs on a central computer and allows managers to control the allocation of settings.
A Floating licence allows the installation of unlimited copies of PitStop Pro across a network, with the licensed number of copies to be used concurrently. The user pays for a specific number of licences, for instance five or ten, with a progressive discount, then adds the PitStop Pro Floating Assurance subscription that includes the Workgroup Manager.
Benefits of Deploying PitStop Pro Floating Licences
When you deploy PitStop Pro Floating Licences, you maximise your investment since your licences are only utilised when they need to be. They are then returned to the server upon quitting Acrobat, enabling others in your company to access them instantly as required. That means you save money and attain more flexibility in operations versus purchasing individual seats.
A workflow with PitStop Pro Floating Licences is easy to set up. An administrator can distribute licences quickly and easily within their company from a centralised server, basically “on-demand”. Floating licencing helps ensure that users have access to PitStop Pro at the right time and enables you to control the use of your software licences easily and efficiently. Licences can be “floated” over an entire corporate network, transferring from one workstation to the next as required, guaranteeing you get the maximum value from each software licence purchased.
Standardisation through central settings
The PitStop Workgroup Manager also enables large companies to apply policies to specific groups. A head of a department can ensure that a workgroup uses only certain settings. They may also want to prohibit users from changing these settings or prevent them from creating new settings. This allows businesses to work in a very standardised way without confusion, and to simplify a group’s work and communication efforts.
The Workgroup Manager application for PitStop Pro Floating Licences also uses a ‘push’ mechanism to reduce the amount of network traffic required and improve communication between PitStop Pro and the Workgroup Manager server. The PitStop Workgroup Manager application can run in the background on any Mac or Windows system on the local area network.
How does it work?
Simply install Enfocus PitStop Workgroup Manager and set it up on a server. Enfocus PitStop Pro is then installed on the computers of all users in the workgroup and is configured to use a floating licence from the Workgroup Manager. Each time a user in the workgroup launches PitStop Pro, his/her copy of PitStop Pro connects to the PitStop Workgroup Manager and checks if there is a floating licence available. If there is, the user can start using PitStop Pro, and if Presets were distributed, the user will have access to an additional set of Presets in the Preset Manager. If the user closes Adobe Acrobat, the licence becomes available for other users in the network. If no floating licences are available, the user will get a warning.
The Workgroup Manager interface consists of four tabs:
• The Licence tab is used to manage and activate the PitStop Pro licences.
• The Users tab and the Groups tab allow the manager to define users and user groups, and to set up the Preset distribution.
• The Monitor tab provides feedback about the PitStop Pro users that connected recently.
Examples of how companies are using Enfocus Workgroup Manager
Company A has multiple departments to assist in handling their combination print and design services business. One department receives PDFs from customers to process in their printing division. Staff receive the PDFs and use PitStop Pro to ensure the documents are print-ready. Another department is staffed with designers who actually produce projects for customers and then save them as PDFs to submit for print to their own facility or to provide to their customers for online use. Since the design department only needs to use PitStop Pro upon completion of a project rather than for full-time use, they simply access PitStop Pro when they are ready to preflight the completed PDF project(s). This saves Company A the necessity and cost of installing individual licences on work stations in both departments that wouldn’t need to be utilised full time.
Company B has a large facility that is staffed in shifts. PitStop Pro Workgroup Manager helps to manage the number of licences they purchased to assure that only the staff who are logged in and working access PitStop Pro licences for preflighting PDFs from internal and external sources. This means that they only need to purchase the number of licences required for any one shift and that the software can be installed on any number of work stations.
Company C actually owns multiple business locations throughout the U.S. They pride themselves on providing consistent quality processing and output of PDF files and wanted to secure that standard for all locations. By using PitStop Pro Floating Licences along with the Enfocus Workgroup Manager, specific settings are shared with all locations and individual staff members are kept from being able to create new settings or from editing the existing settings that Company C requires. This takes the guesswork out of whether each location is maintaining their quality standard.
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