This release of Ziflow Online Proofing includes additions to our automated workflow capabilities, as well as new benefits in the area of proof viewing and administration. Keep reading to learn more about how we've once again simplified the review and approval process.

There is an opportunity in your organization to accelerate creative project delivery, and it’s hiding in plain sight - your creative content production, review, and approval processes.

One of the consistent development themes across our last few releases has been the idea of customer-customization; the ability to customize the online proofing process via automated workflow, custom domains, private comments and account level settings & defaults to name a few examples.  

Published June 7, 2018. Our most recent product release - available today - continues our theme of helping marketing teams & agencies obtain feedback on all their proofs as fast and efficiently as possible by expanding the file types supported in addition to some really powerful ways to help deliver your creative projects.

A great example of a company providing innovation in this area is Dynamicard. Dynamicard is a one-stop shop for innovative direct mail assets - most notably via their very popular die-cut plastic postcard offering. They also offer technology-based services such as tracking and analytics, as well as QR codes, further differentiating their offerings.

The proliferation of digital marketing channels has rapidly increased the demand for content from marketing teams. In addition, marketing cycles have shortened dramatically. As a result,  marketers need to produce more high quality content in less time. And each piece of content needs review at least once before approval and release.

It’s release day here at Ziflow! As we’ve covered on the blog before, the first few releases since our October launch were focused on the core online proofing use cases, a well as performance and scalability.

March was a very busy month for the Ziflow product development team. Today’s release includes several new capabilities, each aimed at helping marketing teams deliver their creative projects faster and more efficiently every day. Large, distributed teams, should especially take note of today’s release as we’re making it even easier for agencies and brands to adopt online proofing as a replacement to emails, printouts and sticky-notes as a means of providing feedback on creative content.   

Let’s take a look at a few of the highlights in this month’s release.

Automated Workflow
One of the most frequently requested features since launch, Automated Workflow, delivers a great new addition for teams with multi-stage review processes. If your review and approval process spans multiple teams inside or outside of your organization, you can now create a workflow to automate the proof routing.  

As a marketing professional, what are the biggest roadblocks that you run into on a daily basis? A growing workload? A lack of review processes and actionable feedback from management? You aren’t alone.
Creative marketing teams have more on their plate than ever before. They are required to produce more work product, often with fewer resources and less internal support. As the rise of digital marketing has shifted the industry landscape, companies and their creative teams have found it difficult to adapt to the rapid changes while maintaining the processes that help to drive high-end creative work in previous decades.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve decided to disrupt the online proofing market and update our product architecture to deliver our solution via blockchain technology.

One of the most tangible ways that Ziflow helps you deliver your marketing projects faster is by providing a streamlined way to review new versions of creative content, side by side.  

Ziflow streamlines the review and approval of creative content to help you deliver your marketing projects faster, by improving your team's collaboration, centralizing feedback and eliminating manual steps through automated workflow.

Once you've signed up for Ziflow, you're on your way to replacing email, printouts and other ad-hoc methods for reviewing your creative content.

The first step in that journey is creating a new proof. 

Ziflow allows busy marketing teams to easily provide and collect feedback on a wide range of file types (documents, designs, etc.) within an intuitive interface, directly on the content being reviewed.  

We've now added Text Select to our annotation tools to facilitate text-level feedback. This new capability is yet another example of how Ziflow helps cut down on context switching during the review process. With Ziflow, you can perform complete reviews of all types of creative assets (designs, brochures, videos, etc.) without the need to switch between multiple applications.

For those Ziflow customers who wish to rebrand their online proofing user experience to match their company branding, we've made a few new additions to the application which will allow you to brand Ziflow accordingly.  

We've added filters to your proofs list to make it even easier to find the proofs you need to work on at any given time.  

Since Ziflow is so easy to use, it’s easy to quickly arrive at a situation where you have pages and pages of proofs in your proof list.  Now, with filters, you can keep your workflow moving along, making sure deadlines are met. 

After spending over 10 years building online proofing systems, and even more before that spent building software for marketing teams and agencies, Mat and I have been asked time and again what makes us different from other applications and, even though there’s a lot we can talk about, we always come back to focus and quality.

In this blog post, I’d like to talk about quality, and in particular PDF processing for review and approval. This also applies to other Adobe file formats being processed for review, such as AI and PSD files.

The rate at which new marketing projects and campaigns are being requested today doesn’t allow for any wasted time. This means organization of your work is a must. With our most recent release of Ziflow we’ve delivered our new folder functionality to just do that, help you keep your projects and proofs organized.