When DDM Marketing & Communications decided to launch the in-house service that eventually became Paperclik.com, like many companies, it was trying to leverage PDF technology over the Web to circumvent the high cost of shipping paper.

Unlike many companies, however, DDM found that the idea was sound enough to turn into a for-profit ASP site.

“We had a number of clients who were asking for ways to reduce the cost of their literature programs and still retain a high degree of customization,” says Mike McCarthy, DDM's president. “We were also asked on a number of occasions if we could develop a product in which multiple clients from inside a company could go in and customize their marketing materials but also retain a high degree of control for the marketing department itself.”

At A Glance

Name: Mike McCarthy, president, and Nate Vandenbroek, lead interactive developer Company: DDM Marketing & Communications Home base: Grand Rapids, Mich. Main PDF use: Custom document assembly over the Web at Paperclik.com Key software: Appligent AppendPDF Pro, MySQL  Interesting stat: Biggest customer has more than 150 users and about 500 individual marketing documents online (and counting) after the first nine months using the Paperclik service.

Driven by Appligent’s AppendPDF Pro running on Red Hat Linux, the Paperclik service can take source files and manipulate them according to the demands of each user’s need du jour, including splitting, merging, appending and stamping PDF files, as well as building tables of contents on the fly.

DDM serves clients in the education, manufacturing, financial services, legal and healthcare fields, among others. It was Varnum, Riddering, Schmidt & Howlett--a large law firm and DDM client--that inspired the launch of Paperclik after its managers saw the beauty of how DDM was assembling its own brochures, case studies, pricing data and biographies on the fly. Paperclik was born when Varnum asked DDM to figure out how its 150 attorneys spread across five offices could do the same thing with Varnum's own literature.

Over Paperclik’s first year, several clients have leveraged Paperclik in different ways. The Varnum marketing staff creates and constantly updates PDFs describing its practice and other aspects of its business, and attorneys in the company's field offices can access and assemble them as needed.

Another DDM client uses the service to give sales staff out on the road access to the most current product data online, which can be accessed via an interactive, database-driven Web site and folded into sales materials en route to appointments with customers.

“They can assemble a PDF, take it over to Kinko’s and print it off--without ever having to go home, request that it be e-mailed to them or FedExing anything around,” says Nate Vandenbroek, DDM's lead interactive developer, who was able to get the first internal iteration of Paperclik (a “beta version that didn’t look pretty but it worked,” as he puts it) up and running online in about three weeks.

Another client, car parts manufacturer Autocam, is using Paperclik to quickly develop multilingual marketing PDFs.

Even though the evolving e-paper market now offers several choices for generating marketing materials on the fly, PDF was the only real choice in McCarthy’s eyes. A lot of PDF proponents bang the “ubiquity” drum, citing the fact that half a billion downloads of Adobe Reader is the main reason to use PDF. But McCarthy cites PDF’s non-editable output format even before that.

“One of the biggest challenges is that our clients have multiple users internally, and the marketing department is held accountable for maintaining the integrity of the image and the content,” McCarthy says. “If they use other forms of software, the individual user can adapt the content and the imagery. PDF technology allows the marketing department to lock out those kinds of adjustments--but if they have a library of PDFs, individual users can still customize documents to their individual needs.”

The ubiquity of Reader and its interactivity with Web browsers were close second and third reasons to go with PDF, Vandenbroek quickly adds. Other major technical considerations that drove DDM toward PDF--and toward Appligent’s particular implementation of the server software--included Linux support and batch-processing features.

Ironically, despite the fact that the ASP model was the torpedo that sank so many Web sites during the late 1990s boom-and-bust period, companies such as FormRouter, Adobe and DDM have figured out how to leverage PDF technology for online ASP services. To McCarthy, whose company is making a go of it by charging a one-time fee to join the service, along with smaller annual maintenance fees, it’s the best business model for Paperclik.

The ASP idea, however, didn’t just come out of nowhere. It took some nudging from a contact at Varnum to get the ball rolling. McCarthy was describing to her the early implementation of what would become Paperclik; at the time, it was a means for DDM to put together internal documents on the fly.

“She about leapt out of her seat and said, ‘Wow, can I see it?’ ” McCarthy says. “When they saw it and the applications for it, they immediately demanded that we develop something for them. It was clear at that point we had something unique in the marketplace.”