Spring 2026 AFP Consortium Meeting Recap: Education Initiatives Advance, Security Updates Finalized, New Page Placement Option Explored
Dennis Carney, President, AFP Consortium
In April 2026, AFP Consortium members gathered for the 2026 AFP Consortium Spring Meeting hosted by Fiery in Calgary, Canada. It is always a joy to meet with some of the world’s most knowledgeable AFP experts. Thank you to Fiery for welcoming the group and hosting such a productive meeting. If you work for a company that is developing AFP products and is not an AFP Consortium member, please consider joining.
Our Fall 2026 meeting will be hosted by Canon in Poing, Germany. We hope to see many AFP Consortium members in attendance to continue progressing this important technology!
Here are some highlights from our Spring meeting:
Other topics of note are:
Until next time,
Dennis
In April 2026, AFP Consortium members gathered for the 2026 AFP Consortium Spring Meeting hosted by Fiery in Calgary, Canada. It is always a joy to meet with some of the world’s most knowledgeable AFP experts. Thank you to Fiery for welcoming the group and hosting such a productive meeting. If you work for a company that is developing AFP products and is not an AFP Consortium member, please consider joining.
Our Fall 2026 meeting will be hosted by Canon in Poing, Germany. We hope to see many AFP Consortium members in attendance to continue progressing this important technology!
Here are some highlights from our Spring meeting:
- Review of proposed architecture that adds a method to place pages on a sheet that provides more flexibility and functionality than the current N-up support and is more straightforward.
- Discussion of significant plans to increase promotion and education about AFP, including analyst studies, advertisements, promotional toolkits, and AFP Consortium website enhancements. We want to spread the word far and wide about AFP’s continued leadership in the high-speed digital printing space, as well as help those new to AFP get the information they need. Stay tuned!
- Review of a list of free AFP tools available online to be published on the AFP Consortium website soon. Having one page that lists all available AFP freeware will help everyone in the AFP community.
Other topics of note are:
- Exciting security news, including AFP support for both “in transit” and “at rest” encryption:
- The official AFP Consortium publication “Recommended Method to Encrypt IPDS Communications” (AFPC-0019-01) was published and announced on the AFP Consortium website. This document recommends that if IPDS communications need to be encrypted, Transport Layer Security (TLS) should be used. This will allow diverse IPDS implementations to securely communicate with each other.
- New architecture to allow customers to encrypt and protect objects in AFP—including text, images, graphics, barcodes, object containers, and metadata—became an official part of the MO:DCA and IPDS architectures. The new functionality will be published soon in updated versions of the MO:DCA Reference and IPDS Reference expected in August.
- Review of proposed architecture to enable the host to pass non-ASCII job names to be displayed on the printer console.
- Review of the new draft versions of the MO:DCA and IPDS References mentioned above.
- Three informative short videos highlighting the value of AFP are now available on our website. Please feel free to share them with others.
- Review of the results of our AFP user survey. Thanks to everyone who has responded! We would love to hear your opinion as well. The survey is available here.
Until next time,
Dennis
