AtroPIM Demo: Print Catalogs That Read the Product Record

A print catalog is a channel. If the PDF is built in a file the PIM never sees, the price and the variant on paper drift from the record your buyers already use. That is what the AtroPIM lightning demo was arguing.

Stephan Spijkers sat down with Alexander Zinchenko, Managing Director and Product Owner at AtroCore, to show catalog and PDF generation from product data already in AtroPIM.

The recording:

Speakers:

• Stephan Spijkers, Co-Founder, PIMvendors.com
• Alex Zinchenko, Managing Director and Product Owner, AtroCore / AtroPIM

Zinchenko showed HTML and CSS templates, control parameters for layout and logic, and an API path so a catalog, a price list or a product sheet can be requested rather than pasted together. The demo covered a table of contents and multi-level variants, which is where technical catalogs usually break: the parent, the variant and the price have to land on the right page. He set two paths side by side. Native generation when speed matters. InDesign when a designer still owns the layout. The trade-off is control against how fast a price list can leave the building.

The demo addressed manufacturers with large, data-heavy catalogs and technical sheets. It presented AtroPIM as open source and modular. Both are claims to test in selection, not reasons to skip the requirements.

Ask for three things on your own catalog:

• A template that uses your variants, including the ones that are awkward, not the sample family in the demo data.
• Who may change a layout rule after go-live, your team or a designer in InDesign.
• Which systems call the API, so print-on-demand is a channel you run, not a script one person knows.

Publication is the last step of the record, and print is one output of it. That sequence is in the product data process. The experience a buyer sees, on paper or on a site, still starts from the record, which is the point of what PXM stands for. Output, templates and channel rules belong in the capability list in PIM features and capabilities. If the demo fit looks real, compare the vendor with the rest of the shortlist in AtroPIM alternatives.