In times where much talk is of secure online transactions, the next generation Internet applications and Webservices it is amazing to see how frequently fax continues to be used for business communications. One example of this phenomenon is in the processing of credit card transactions – in particular where many branches of banks communicate with a service provider. For card applications, cancellations, blocking of cards and many other transactions it is not at all unusual to see the issuing bank fill out a paper form and send it via facsimile to the service provider.
Then in many cases the received fax pages are printed, manually sorted according to transaction type, issuing bank, region and other criteria and distributed, again manually, to operators who finally type all relevant data into back office systems.
CardProcess GmbH, a company handling 3 million credit cards for the Cooperative Banking Group in Germany, recently undertook a major project to accelerate this laborious process and to make it much more secure and cost efficient. Facsimiles are now received and stored electronically; all relevant data is extracted from the images automatically by optical character recognition (OCR), forwarded to a workflow management system and finally safely stored on non erasable media meeting all compliance regulations.
“With MessagePlus/Open we have a powerful tool which really streamlined, automated and secured the former manual work processes to a very high degree. Currently we process some 36,000 transactions per month without problems and the solution is perfectly adopted to our specific business needs” states Patrick Lenz, the responsible project manager with CardProcess.
In December 1992 the first text message in history was sent to a mobile phone in the UK wishing Richard Jarvis a „Merry Christmas“. Some 20 years later it is estimated that some 2,5 billion phone subscribers worldwide use the Short Messaging Service (SMS) as a means of interpersonal communication and an increasing amount of SMS messages is processed by computer systems.
The latest soccer results, political news, weather reports or financial data are just a few examples of computer generated information you may receive on your (mobile) phone. If you want to be informed when the stock price of a share drops below a certain value you may subscribe to a service to notify you of this event, you may use the SMS service to vote for your favourite song, your bank may send you information about new products or changes in terms and conditions, and you can order your favourite book by SMS.
MessagePlus/Open is mainly perceived as an enterprise fax server solution and it is much less commonly known that you also can easily exploit the system to implement SMS based services. For MessagePlus/Open SMS is simply another communications channel which can be accessed by applications using any of the existing integration options.
If you want notify users when a fax or email message has been received, alert people to an exceptional event requiring immediate attention or run a marketing campaign you simply have to configure SMS communication channels connected either to local modems or more typically to a Short Message Service Centre (SMSC) and MPO will do the rest. In addition the flexible workflow facilities of MessagePlus/Open allow to easily implement more complex SMS applications including database lookups and various interactive scenarios.
With the rise of email and Web-based communications fax is often regarded as being dead as an important technology for exchanging business information. The reality however looks quite different and fax continues to be a major channel for business communications in many industries.
Take a closer look at what may seem an amazing fact and learn how Generali Deutschland Informatik Services process millions of fax pages each year for major insurance companies within the Generali Group in Germany and 13 other European countries. To read the whole story click here.
We state on our Website that Intercope provides solutions for mission critical business communications, but what do we actually mean by „mission critical business communications“? Let’s look at a few examples. When a large bank cannot transfer international payments for some hours this may easily generate costs of several hundred thousand Euros. When a large supermarket chain cannot process orders due to a failure of their communication system customers may not get the products they are looking for in thousands of shops in several countries. Or imagine the cost for lawyers, the loss of customer satisfaction and confidence when the processing of claims is significantly delayed in an insurance company due to technical constraints. All these are examples of mission critical systems where a failure may cause considerable damage to the business.
But how can we state that mission critical communications in the examples above simply do not fail when deploying Box for SWIFTNet or MessagePlus/Open? However well software is designed and tested we still have to face the fact that anything can fail: application software, operating system components, hardware and communication channels. Well, what you have to do if you have to guarantee the highest availability levels of 99.9% and above is to avoid any single point of failure in a trusted environment which you completely control.
This is why our products support a wide range of operating systems and their standard cluster solutions such as the Parallel Sysplexarchitecture of z/OS, AIX High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP), SUN Solaris Cluster or Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) / Failover Clustering, and the high availability solutions for virtualized environments. All of the above high-availability support is provided as a standard component of the Intercope solutions and not as an expensive optional add-on.
With these options MessagePlus/Open and Box for SWIFTNet are quite unique in the marketplace: when you have to implement high availability architecture you are not bound to specific environments such as the Windows operating system, but you can build it on the hardware and software platform which is your strategic infrastructure of choice.
Being in the centre of Europe the airspace over Germany experiences some of the world’s heaviest air traffic densities. Some 6,000 air-traffic controllers, engineers and technicians of the German Air Traffic Control organisation, “Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH”, ensure the smooth and safe passage of up to 10,000 flights daily.
Guaranteeing the safeand efficient control of these flights puts the highest demands on both people and technology. MessagePlus/Open plays an important role in this critical environment to facilitate the risk-freejournies of passengers, crew and airplanes.
“AIS and AAIS provide pilots, airports and airlines with all the necessary information in a safe and timely manner. Not once has the system been down or faulty. In this system simply everything has been considered – it is a perfect solution. MessagePlus/Open makes an invaluable contribution to air traffic safety in Germany” concludes Norbert Konle, manager Flight Data Processing at Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH. To read the whole story click here.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is today’s standard for the transmission of E-mail via IP networks. It has prevailed against more complex protocols such as X.400 mainly because of its simplicity as indicated by its name. And what more do you need for e-mail? You can already have any number of recipients in the To-field, as carbon copy (CC), and blind carbon copy (BCC), provide a subject heading and the message body may contain text in addition to any type of attachment.
It goes without saying that MessagePlus/Open (MPO) supports this standard. However, several extensions are also implemented by MPO to meet particular requirements of customers who use the integration module to connect to their internal mail systems such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.
Several users of MPO not only use the SMTP integration to enable individual email users to send and receive faxes in their mail client, but in addition they deploy the SMTP protocol as a transport layer to exchange messages between applications and MPO. This requirement brought up the question of how transmission control parameters, metadata of received faxes and transmission notifications could be transferred in structured fields which could be easily generated and interpreted by those applications. The solution to this issue was to interpret “user defined fields” in the SMTP header, allowing an application to encode data such as parameters for transmission control, cover page related information etc. in the structured fields of the SMTP header.
Other customers have defined fax-numbers, sender related parameters and further fax transmission options which should be interpreted by MessagePlus/Open in the Notes address books or Microsoft active directory. There is no way to access this information via SMTP but with another extension MPO can easily process this data: The MPO SMTP gateway contains an option to lookup the directories of email systems via the Light Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and to insert data from the sender’s and the recipient’s entries from these directories into the transmission order. Alternatively the data can be synchronized on a regular basis via a scheduled batch process, which actually is the option preferred by most customers as it avoids dependencies in online message handling.
On the incoming side MPO uses its User Profile Management capabilities to determine the address of recipients which correspond to a dialled phone number extension. For email addresses the received fax can then be delivered via the SMTP gateway as an attachment to an email. Furthermore the data utilised by the MPO User Profile Management does not have to be maintained manually, but can be automatically synchronized with external directories such as Notes address books or Active Directory.
Many companies are currently either implementing or considering projects to converge data and voice networks. With “Voice over IP” (VoIP) a mature technology is available for this purpose form several suppliers, and the benefits of this approach are obvious including significant cost reductions with regard to hardware, software, maintenance and administration.
At the same time fax remains an important media for business communication but is still transmitted and received through the traditional telephone network. Sooner or later a question pops up in most companies migrating voice to IP but who have significant fax traffic: “Do we really have to keep this island of phone lines, PABX, fax machines and fax boards for the fax service?”
The answer to this question is definitely – “no”. With MessagePlus/Open you can seamlessly migrate your fax traffic to an IP based infrastructure avoiding any migration risks. Based on the T.38 protocol for Fax over IP in real-time, MessagePlus/Open provides the same degree of reliability and scalability for Fax over IP as you are used to having with traditional phone lines. The MessagePlus/Open Fax over IP solution is compatible with all T.38 – T.30 gateways and systems such as CISCO Unified Communication Manager, Avaya Communication Manager, Nortel Communication Server and others.
Fax over IP with MessagePlus/Open does not require fax boards anymore. It is a pure software based solution communicating through a standard TCP/IP connection. Beside the savings you realize, a major benefit of this solution is that you can deploy the complete system in virtualized environments – something that has not been possible as long as special fax hardware was required. You can find more information about Fax over IP and the MessagePlus/Open implementation of this protocol in the following document.
MessagePlus/Open comes with a comprehensive User Profile Management (UPM) capability allowing the modelling of complex organizational structures with many hierarchical levels. It is even possible to define several independent organizations in a single MessagePlus/Open instance, each owning it’s own virtual system – a very interesting option for service providers. However, when these options are not required the software comes with a preconfigured UPM, which can be adapted to customer specific needs with few clicks in the administration GUI.
One capability of the MessagePlus/Open UPM is providing access control for system functions – if necessary with fine granularity. What is less well known is that the UPM provides various options for defining attributes which can significantly enrich the system usage for users of email systems as well as for external applications interacting with MessagePlus/Open via integration modules.
Let’s look at a specific example. A user is sending fax messages from an Outlook client via MessagePlus/Open and needs to have his personal TSID (Transmitter Subscriber ID) in the fax header line. In addition he wants to use a personalized coverpage which should include his full name, department name and phone number. If this user is defined in the UPM with the above information and sends a message from his Outlook client to a fax recipient then MessagePlus/Open automatically looks up the UPM record corresponding to his email address and adds the required parameters.
Also on the incoming side the usage of the MessagePlus/Open UPM makes a lot of sense for external users and applications. A typical example would be where a specific fax number or extension is set up for individual users, user groups or applications. If a fax message is received on this dialup number MessagePlus/Open can determine the associated delivery destinations such as email addresses, printers or applications. Using the analysis features of MessagePlus/Open it is even possible to determine specific entities such as item groups or index classes in a content management system corresponding to a combination of various attributes of the received message.
Well, our Outlook user probably will be happy with these functions. However his system administrator most probably will see things a bit different – in particular if he has to maintain thousands of users. The good news for him is that you can use the described functions without creating or updating anything manually in the MessagePlus/Open UPM as tools are provided to automatically synchronize this data with external directories through the LDAP protocol. Once the UPM synchronization tool is configured all relevant data is automatically synchronized with Active Directory or other external sources and you will not only have satisfied users but also relaxed system administrators.
Within the scope of Web development and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) Web Services have become an increasingly popular means of application integration. Basically Web Services provide a standard facility for interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. As a communication layer they use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to receive XML structured messages and to reply to these requests. Typically there is a machine-readable description of the operations offered by the service written in the Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Intercope uses this technology to provide services to applications in both the generic business communication solution “MessagePlus/Open” and in the SWIFT Message Processing System “BOX for SWIFTNet”.
MessagePlus/Open provides a Web Service to create messages and to send them to various destinations. This “SubmitMessageRequest” contains one or more content items in different formats such as text or graphics and of course a recipient in form of a fax, email or SMS address.
The MessagePlus/Open Web Service replies with an “Order ID”. This Order ID can be used later by the client application to retrieve the actual status of the message. In response to this request the MessagePlus/Open Web Service replies with status information indicating if the message was sent successfully together with transmission time stamps and additional reference information.
The FIN MessageValidation Service allows an application to send a message to the service and to receive a reply indicating whether or not the message passed validation, or if not, which syntactical or semantic errors were detected.
The RMA Fast Permission Check verifies if an RMA authorization exists for a specific correspondent and specific message type and returns the result to the calling application.
With these Web Services BOX for SWIFTNet provides the same functions as the former MERVA BKE lookup and the MERVA validation API call, but through a modern, future-oriented interface fitting into the strategy of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). One of the environments in which these services have been deployed and tested is the IBM Enterprise Payment Platform (EPP) where INTERCOPE achieved the then highest status of SOA certified partners with IBM.
MessagePlus/Open V4 Release 3 is now general available with several new features and significant enhancements including the following:
64 bit version
MessagePlus/Open is available as 64 bit application for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, AIX and Solaris. A Linux version is planned. Distributed installations with components running on 64 and 32 bit servers are possible.
Web Service for message creation
A new message creation web service is provided in order to expand the possibilities to send faxes and receive status information in SOA oriented environments including a broad set of optional parameters. The results of such a transmission order can be obtained by a ”GetStatus” operation.
Database Gateway supports transmission orders and MSSQL
The MessagePlus/Open database gateway has always been able to retrieve the results of transmissions (transmission reports) generated by other integration modules. Now in addition it is possible to generate transmission orders through this gateway. Microsoft SQL Server is now supported as well as DB2 and Oracle for the database gateway.
LDAP UPM Synchronization
The LDAP UPM Synchronizeris a tool to synchronize the MessagePlus/Open User Profile Management with external directories via the LDAP protocol. Attributes of the external directory can be flexibly mapped to properties of MessagePlus/Open users. The tool can be scheduled to run at predefined times to automatically update the MessagePlus/Open UPM e.g. once a day.
Single Sign On with Windows credentials
With the single sign-on feature it is possible for a user to only log in once at his Windows domain and gain access to the MessagePlus/Open Web-Client automatically without a separate login procedure.
Scheduled message processing
Application queues may now have a status “Started” or “Stopped” which can be controlled manually or by an automatic schedule. For a “Stopped” queue processing will be halted until the queue is started again either manually or automatically.
MPO Transfer enhancements
The migration of data from one MessagePlus/Open instance to a second system (e.g. from a test to a production system) has been enhanced by an additional migration option of the “MPO transfer” tool.
GUI performance enhancements
Database optimizations have been implemented to accelerate access to message journals and application queues under various filter criteria.
If you need more information about MessagePlus/Open V4R3 please contact support@intercope.com.
Fax server marketplace trends
The fax server market is in a consolidation phase and growth rates of server systems have declined in recent years. This is despite the fact that fax continues to be an essential component in many critical business processes. Fax has many advantages given its real-time nature, the difficulty of interception and the simplicity of fax devices. Several traditional providers of fax solutions have accepted the stabilisation of the marketplace and decided to concentrate their corporate strategy and main growth efforts on other business lines. Others have become part of larger Enterprise Content Management and Data Capture companies for which the fax business is at best of minor interest to their corporate strategy and revenue. This consolidation and reduction in interest by major players is a process that is expected to continue
Ongoing investment and modernization
As a long established, privately owned independent company not influenced by the stock market and private equity crises INTERCOPE is committed vis-à-vis our current and future customers to making ongoing investments in the Fax market segment and to offering a solution utilising the latest technology standards and providing high availability options and high quality 24/7 support.
Highly attractive trade-in options
Envisaging and recognising the changes taking place in the traditional fax server market INTERCOPE is offering highly attractive trade-in options for current users of the increasing number of fax solutions which are no longer seen as strategic by their vendors. These options help companies to protect investments and at the same time remove some of the risks associated with products whose future is no longer certain.
