Scriptura Engage 7.3 White paper.

Scriptura Engage 7.3

White paper

Table of contents

1. Management Summary 4

2. Introduction of the Scriptura Engage solution 6

Integration 7

Architecture based on open standards 8

Input from a variety of data sources and formats 9

Composition 10

Save costs 10

Reduce the number of templates 10

Reduce time-to-market 11

Graphical user interface 13

Design once, use many 13

Based on open standards 14

Performance 14

Many advanced design features, including: 14

Interaction 15

Electronic forms 15

Interactive document creation: LiveDocs 15

Processing 17

Put the customer first 17

Graphical interface 17

Document comparison 18

Document and page oriented operations 18

Make optimal use of available resources 19

AFP Input 19

Security 19

Protect your documents and detect fraud 20

Reduce costs 20

Increase productivity 20

Customer loyalty 20

Digital signing (part of IntelliStamp): 21

Multichannel 21

Customer experience 21

Standardize 21

Reduce costs 21

Use different channels 21

Event flow 22

Facility 22

Automate all information flows 22

Optimal use and performance of resources 22

Centralized control 22

Turn a cost center into a profit center 22

Tracking and reporting of activities 23

3. Company description 24

4. Contact & more information 24

1.

Management Summary

The majority of organizations communicate through the exchange of various types of

communication: email, postal mail, online documents and more and more also social media and sms/text messages. In the eyes of customers, these types of communication aren’t just about the companies they do business with – they often are the company. The need to increase customer satisfaction and grow market share has become so essential that businesses cannot remain competitive without technology to provide relevant and fully personalized communications across multiple channels.

Communication isn’t just about ‘company to the customer’, it often is the company.

Scriptura Engage enables you to get the maximum value out of any kind of customer

communication; whether it is based on printed output, an online application, email, social media or any other tool.

We supply innovative software solutions that enable organizations to interact with their customers through high-quality, personalized communications across multiple channels. This results in increased customer loyalty, while reducing costs and time-to-market. The combination of improvements generally results in a project return on investment (ROI) of 6 to 15 months.

Scriptura Engage is used in a myriad of environments, supported by strong benefits:

 Personal

 Use the valuable information you have on a customer to personalize every moment of contact. Scriptura can create value from multiple sources, whether it’s a database, CRM, accounting, SAP or other system.

 Relative

 Provide relative information to your customers, based on preference, content and context.

 Intuitive

 Scriptura was designed to allow non-it personnel to manage and create templates and personalized communications. This drastically reduces development time for your IT- department, allowing them to focus on innovation.

 Consistent

 Maintain full control of your regulatory compliance and corporate identity throughout your entire organization.

 Interactive

 One-way communication can be powerful, but interactive electronic forms give you instant feedback that can be used to enhance customer experience or trigger follow-up messages.

 Future proof

 Scriptura is completely built on open standards and is platform independent, allowing for scalable integration with your current and future environments.

 Automated

 Our advanced business flow interface allows you to automate nearly any task based on your business processes. This will result in a more effective communication, giving your

customers the information they need, when they need it, through their preferred channel.

2.

Introduction of the Scriptura Engage solution

Scriptura Engage helps organizations by providing a single, central platform to manage and optimize all customer communications. All within intuitive graphical interfaces, so no programming is needed to add or change existing output processes. This results in significantly reduced time-to- market if you want to add new communication channels or change existing processes.

The Scriptura Engage Communications Platform (Scriptura Engage) offers customers the following benefits:

 Communications platform

 Integration

 Composition

 Interaction

 Processing

 Security

 Multichannel

 Facility (Tracking, Closed Loop & reporting)

Figure 1: Scriptura Engage Customer Communications Platform

Integration

Specific actions within an organization trigger a business process: a new customer, a complaint, an invoicing process etc. Documents and output form only a part of that business process. There are also processes involved like data creation, content management, document management, archival and more. Scriptura Engage offers a wide range of interfaces and connectors to integrate with other applications, like:

 Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

 Business Process Management (BPM)

 Archiving Systems

 Document Management Systems (DMS)

 And many others

Scriptura Engage can combine data and information from multiple systems in one output process.

Figure 1: Scriptura Engage integrates with different enterprise applications

Because every customer has its own specific environment, we wanted to develop a solution that could fit different types of existing environments, without the need to change the underlying technologies or systems used by a customer. Therefore, it was a strategic decision to work with open standards, so Scriptura Engage could be integrated into other products and solutions. Because of this, Scriptura Engage has a unique architecture and takes a unique position in the marketplace.

Independent market research has highly valued our architectural approach.

For some technical aspects, we do have co-operations with other vendors, of which we integrate their tools as OEM-components. In the future we foresee further integrations with OEM components such as printer stream conversion and MSWord integration. Apart from the native integrated OEM components, there are a variety of connectors available to integrate Scriptura Engage with other solutions such as CRM, ERP, queues, printers, post processing machines, email servers etc.

See below for just some of the applications we can integrate with (we do not pack these solutions with Scriptura Engage).

Figure 2: Some of the applications Scriptura Engage can integrate with

Architecture based on open standards

Open standards are standards that are vendor-neutral, consensus-driven, openly-specified and freely available. In contrast, a proprietary standard is a standard that has been developed and is owned by an individual or organization, the use of which generally requires a license or a royalty payment.

Scriptura Engage uses the following open standards:

 XML

 XSLT

 XSL-FO

 WebDAV

 SVG

 LDAP

 SOAP

 XForms

 HTML

 and many others

• Tibco

• Active MQ

• MQ Series

• Etc

JDBC JMS

JCR CRM/ERP

• Siebel

• Salesforce.com

• MS CRM

• SAP

• Oracle Apps

• Etc ...

ECM/DM

• FileNet

• Documentum

• OpenText

• Sharepoint

• Alfresco

• Interwoven

• Vignette

• Etc ....

• Oracle DB

• MySQL

• MSSQL

• Etc

Input from a variety of data sources and formats

Scriptura Engage can take input data from any combination of different data sources, also providing data enrichment and transformations. Supported data sources include:

 XML

 XSLT transformations

 CSV (Comma Separated Values)

 Text (record types)

 Formatted Text File (spoolfile scraping)

 Customer data source

 Direct database access:

 The Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API is the industry standard for database- independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of databases – SQL databases and other tabular data sources, such as spreadsheets or flat files.

The JDBC API provides a call-level API for SQL-based database access.

 Scriptura Engage is capable of interacting with the following databases by using the standard JDBC interface (other solutions that provide a JDBC implementation can be plugged in very easily):

 Oracle Database

 PostgreSQL

 MySQL

 Microsoft SQL Server

 IBM DB2

 Terradata

 Sybase

 Web Services (HTTP, REST, SOAP)

 Hot Folder interfaces

 MQ Series

 Tibco

 JMS (Java Messaging Service) defines the standard for reliable Enterprise Messaging. Enterprise messaging, often also referred to as Messaging Oriented Middle-ware (MOM) is universally recognized as an essential tool for building enterprise applications. By combining Java technology with enterprise messaging, the JMS API provides a powerful tool for solving enterprise computing problems.

Scriptura Engage is capable of interacting with the following message oriented middleware solutions by using the standard JMS interface:

 IBM WebSphere MQ (aka IBM MQ Series)

 TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

 Apache ActiveMQ

 Fiorano MQ

 Sonic ESB

 Sun MQ

JMS connectivity:

Both in large as small enterprises, many challenges exist when integrating various services and data.

In many cases enterprise architectures use an enterprise service bus, enterprise application integration system, message broker or large scale enterprise application. Now Scriptura Engage contains out of the box support for integrating with many of those message queue systems which makes integration even faster than before. Some widely used examples:

 Apache ActiveMQ

 Redhat JBoss HornetQ

 Oracle OpenMQ

 Apache Qpid

 Progress SoniqMQ

 IBM Websphere MQ

 Amazon SQS

 Oracle AQ

 Oracle Service Bus

 AMPQ

 TIBCO Enterprise Message Service

 Microsoft Message Queueing

 SAP Netweaver Process Integration

 Etc.…

Composition

The Scriptura Engage Designer allows business users to design document templates and document flows through a highly intuitive graphical user interface. Users can design complex output

templates, define conditional logic, and specify production characteristics without programming and without being dependent of the IT department.

Scriptura Engage helps you providing your customers with understandable, personalized and relevant documents, where good design leads to better customer experience.

Save costs

By Scriptura Engage’s broad functionality, it can replace other existing document applications. We have customers that replaced more than 40 different output applications with Scriptura Engage.

This has resulted in savings in license cost, maintenance cost, training cost etc. Scriptura Engage is perfectly scalable to be used within different types of document processes (batch, on demand, interactive, e-forms).

Reduce the number of templates

With Scriptura Engage, our customers can drastically reduce the number of templates, in some cases up to more than 87%. This is the result of an efficient template management and also of valuable template functions like reusable objects, multi-lingual and dynamic layout etc.

Reduce time-to-market

By using Scriptura Engage, the time needed to design and maintain templates is drastically reduced, in some cases up to more than 75%. This is the result of the user-friendly design interface that enables business users to do template design and maintenance.

Floating license

The Scriptura Designers is not seat based, but is a floating license. This offers a more flexible way of working.

The Scriptura Engage Designer includes two functions: a template designer and a document flow designer.

 The Scriptura Engage Template Designer is a WYSIWYG application that allows non-IT users to design document templates through a highly intuitive graphical user interface. Business users can design complex output templates, define conditional logic, and specify production characteristics without programming and without being dependent of the IT department.

Apart from templates, the Scriptura Engage Template Designer allows to create and modify reusable objects (or text blocks), letter definitions and letter trees. Many sophisticated design features are available: dynamic lists, charts, tables, images, conditional logic, the use of conversion tables, importing of existing Word documents. A multi-lingual feature allows creating documents in multiple languages from one single template. If the user chooses to generate online fill-in forms, these can be also created with the Scriptura Engage Designer. The Scriptura Engage Designer includes all specific features for designing such forms (check boxes, radio buttons, fill-in fields etc.). Reusable objects are designed once and can be reused in multiple templates.

The Scriptura Engage Designer creates, maintains and stores templates in a Repository (based on WebDav, CVS, Subversion etc.). Data from various sources can be combined with templates via several mechanisms: XML (with XPath), JDBC (with SQL queries), ASCII or text data. All data is internally converted to XML and this technology is used to process the data. A one button preview function is available to visualize any change made to the template against sample data, which allows for rapid prototyping.

Figure 3: Screenshot of Scriptura Engage Designer for template design

 The Scriptura Engage Document Flow Designer is a feature that allows you to graphically design a document process or workflow, without the need for programming or scripting. It uses a series of steps, which are basic functions like "Add Barcode" or "Deliver via email", and connections which are lines that connect the steps together. Scriptura Engage comes out of the box with a rich set of steps, but thanks to the open and pluggable architecture of Scriptura Engage, it is possible to extend this functionality with "custom steps", that may be built using an open API.

Such custom steps can be simply deployed in future versions of Scriptura Engage by simply reusing the original plugin, created once.

Figure 4: Screenshot of Scriptura Engage Designer for document flow design

The templates, reusable objects, document flows and other shared resources are stored in a repository based on the WebDav standard, CVS, Subversion or other Eclipse compliant repositories and it uses an LDAP server to manage and check authorities on templates.

Graphical user interface

The Scriptura Engage Designer allows users to graphically design document templates and document flows. There is no need to program; all features are provided through the use of drag-'n-drop interfaces.

Design once, use many

Create your templates once and simultaneously output to different formats and different output processes (high volume/batch, on demand, interactive).

 PDF

 XSL-FO

 XSLT

 eForms

 ZPL

 Google Docs

 PS

 PCL

 AFP

 RTF

 HTML

 DOC

 DOCX

 ODT

 PDF-A

 TIFF

 JPEG

 PNG

 PDF/A-1a

 SVG

Based on open standards

The document template is a combination of XSLT, XSL-FO, XForms and other open standards.

Performance

 High capacity

 Scalable

 High performance

 Multi-threading

 High volume

 Load balancing

Many advanced design features, including:

 Multilingual text blocks

 Styles for brand management

 Color profiles

 Dynamic reusable objects

 Charts, bar codes, form fields, tables and much more

 Intelligent eForms

 Interactive documents

 Extensive data retrieval

 User XSL extensions

 Multi interface control

 Secure templates on multiple levels, including object security and user security

 Impact analysis

 Custom repository

 Simultaneous multichannel publishing

 Nested tables

 Conditional logic in simple mode (wizard driven) and advanced mode

 Custom scripting

 SNMP monitoring & reporting

 and much more

Interaction

Traditional one-way communication is no longer sufficient. Organizations need to engage in a conversation with their customers, otherwise they will unwillingly destroy valuable customer relationships. Scriptura Engage is a great solution for all kinds of interactive document and electronic forms applications, such as insurance claims handling, customer service documents, quote or offer generation and lots more.

Scriptura Engage enables customer interaction on two levels: interactive document composition and electronic forms.

Electronic forms

The use of electronic forms to gather customer data improves responsiveness. It's easy, flexible and green.

Scriptura Engage allows designing intelligent, electronic forms that integrate perfectly with your current website or intranet. There is no programming involved so designing interactive forms is effortless for both IT users and business users.

 Automatically process input data from electronic forms, saving time and resources.

 Reduce your organization's carbon footprint by eliminating paper processes.

 Anytime, anywhere - offer your customers the flexibility to fill out their forms at the office or from the comfort of their home.

 Our intelligent electronic forms are capable of prefilling known fields to simplify customer actions. The entire form can even change behavior based on the profile of the customer.

 Built-in data validation capabilities allow you to automatically verify information as the user completes the form - improving both data accuracy and transaction processing time. The templates containing form elements can be processed via a standard browser application.

Interactive document creation: LiveDocs

Customer-facing departments often spend a lot of time updating and completing customer communications. This is often done using a variety of different applications, including Word. This results in inconsistent look-and-feel, errors and lack of control on compliance or organizational standards.

 Interactive correspondence creation, selection and ordering of text blocks

 Modify documents after generation, while protecting corporate identity

 Enrich data by user

 Consistent look-and-feel

 Create relevant customer correspondence

 Better control on regulatory compliance

 Role based rules to limit access to certain document types

 Fully automated delivery of documents

Scriptura Engage enables interactive document creation by using a standard set of building blocks:

 Paragraphs

 Images, logo’s, barcodes

 Free text

 Titles & headings

 Attachments

 etc.

These building blocks will appear on the final document based on predefined rules.

Figure 5: Interactive document creation

Scriptura Engage uses a standard web browser (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), from which users can compose and preview documents. Users can compose documents by selecting predefined paragraphs, filling in certain fields or typing additional text. On top of that, additional data (CRM, ERP, Accounting…) can be automatically merged in from the calling application. At the same time Scriptura Engage will respect all business rules that have been set up by the template designer.

Select your building blocks

Merge with real data & business

rules

Preview the final

result

Scriptura Engage uses a standard web browser (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), from which users can compose and preview documents. Users can compose documents by selecting predefined paragraphs, filling in certain fields or typing additional text. On top of that, additional data (CRM, ERP, Accounting…) can be automatically merged in from the calling application. At the same time Scriptura Engage will respect all business rules that have been set up by the template designer.

Figure 8: Document flow example for interactive document creation

When the user is completely satisfied with the “interactive” document, it can be submitted for production, either in real-time or deferred for inclusion with other batch documents.

Due to the multi-lingual features of Scriptura Engage, it offers both a choice of a multi-lingual user interface to the interactive document composer, as well as multi-lingual output documents.

Processing

Before your documents are delivered to the customer, different processing steps need to be executed: grouping of output documents, routing to different locations or preparing for postal handling. Scriptura Engage offers a wide range of processing functionalities.

Put the customer first

Customer central because more consistent communication, proactive detection of errors and fast throughput

Graphical interface

Document processing is done using a graphical interface, so no programming is needed to add or change existing output processes, like the ones above. This results in significant reduced time-to- market if you want to add new communication channels or change existing processes.

Example:

Suppose you want to send a welcome letter to every new customer. If this customer provided an email address, Scriptura Engage will automatically produce the welcome letter in PDF and email it.

When a customer only provided his home address, the letter will be printed and sent by postal mail.

It's even possible to send a text message (SMS) or send a message using social media announcing the arrival of the contract.

And this is not even a complex situation! What if you wanted to combine the welcome letter with other customer communications, to promote other products or services? Or if your organization needs to track-and-trace certain output flows for quality assurance or to comply with regulations?

In almost every organization, these processes need to be programmed. This means high costs, additional resources, increased time-to-market and difficulty to maintain.

Scriptura Engage's output processing capabilities include:

Document comparison

We offer advanced document comparison for different use cases. Our ‘output control’ document compare automatically compares different versions of the same document when your environment changes. Typically used in regression testing. Our Scanned document compare allows you to compare the original document with a scanned version of the document. Example: can be used to compare an incoming signed contract and its original outgoing version for unauthorized changes.

Changes are highlighted in a visual way.

Document and page oriented operations

 Bundling, sorting, grouping, adding separator pages ...

 Postal optimizations, like adding bar codes and Mail ID

 Post processing equipment provisioning

 Intermediate page store

 Merging different output streams

 Regeneration and reprinting

 Quality control regarding contents

Make optimal use of available resources

 Gather documents during the day for night-time processing

 Combine output from multiple applications

AFP Input

This module allows you to pick up streams of AFP coming from any source or application to facilitate processing by Scriptura Server (adding barcodes, sorting, splitting, tracking …).

Security

When you provide your customers with electronic documents, you want to make sure that the recipient cannot make any unauthorized changes. Scriptura Engage provides electronic signing of digital documents, using digital signatures. But what with those electronic documents that are printed by the customer?

Scriptura Engage can guarantee document authenticity of both the electronic original and the print out of the document.

It's a fact that digital documents offer a wide variety of advantages, from reduced printing costs to environmental-friendly communications. But it's also a fact that a lot of business processes still require paper documents. And that a large part of your customer base will print the electronic documents they receive from your organization, because people trust paper and it's still their preferred channel.

Scriptura Engage uses IntelliStamp, one of our other solutions. IntelliStamp is a QR bar code that is used to secure any type of electronic and paper document, by including a visual security stamp. This stamp contains a copy of the most important data contained in the document. IntelliStamp enables to verify whether this data has changed on the paper version of the document, compared to the original version.

The actual content and physical appearance of the stamp can be reconfigured to match the needs of the user.

Figure 6: IntelliStamp placed on a document to prevent fraud and guarantee authenticity

Protect your documents and detect fraud

 Secure digital documents and their paper print outs

 Detect unauthorized changes on the paper printout by verifying the IntelliStamp

Reduce costs

 Reduce loss by fraud

 Reduce printing costs and postage costs by sending electronic documents that are secured by IntelliStamp

Increase productivity

 Automatically compare and detect changes between an incoming paper document compared to its original electronic version, e.g. for signed contracts

 No need for paper certificates or other legal documents. Documents can be send electronically, while guaranteeing the authenticity of a paper print out

Customer loyalty

 Offering new channels can serve new markets

 Improve customer experience (serve your customers better and faster)

 Provide your customer with channel of choice. We believe in evolution, not in revolution

Digital signing (part of IntelliStamp):

 Sign and secure documents with a digital signature.

Multichannel

Your customers demand delivery of documents across multiple channels (web, print, email, fax, social media, etc.) but this is expensive and time-consuming with proprietary solutions. With Scriptura Engage, you can automatically create output for multiple channels. And because Scriptura Engage is based on open standards, our solution can support virtually any existing or future channel.

The solution enables organizations to create multichannel and multi-format documents in 1 run, e.g.

produce PDF, AFP and PCL5 instantly without changing the template or without changing the process. This results in enormous time and cost savings.

Scriptura Engage enables true multichannel communications.

Be aware though that multichannel communication is not just 'using different channels'. To offer a true multichannel experience it is critical to manage communications across the channels your different customer profiles prefer.

Customer experience

 Deliver communications using your customer's preferred channel, resulting in a better customer experience.

 Faster delivery, using electronic channels

 Make use of new communication channels like social media and SMS (test message)

Standardize

 Provide a consistent look and feel across channels.

 Automatically produce multichannel output based on business rules from one and the same template

Reduce costs

 Make use of cheaper channels.

 Reduce printing costs, postage costs, handling costs and delivery costs.

Use different channels

 Create and distribute print, email, text/SMS messages, social media messages and push notifications.

 Automatically test email communications against a variety of widely used email clients.

Event flow

Event flow is a new feature aimed at orchestrating processes. It works closely together with document flow and will allow you to keep states, react on events and generate new tasks. Event flow is extremely powerful when used to predefine different multichannel delivery scenarios, but can be used for general processes, like approval workflow creation, as well.

Facility

Facility has the goal to improve the efficiency, productivity and accountability on one hand and to improve customer satisfaction on the other hand. All of this has to be possible in a way that no (re)programming is necessary and the production flow is not obstructed.

To be able to fulfill these requirements, a Facility implementation should bring the following added values:

Automate all information flows

 Reduce manual labor costs

 Real time document tracking

 Less errors in critical output

Optimal use and performance of resources

 Increased production capacity

 Improved productivity

 Reduced wastage

 Lower costs

Centralized control

 Multiple jobs to be processed simultaneously

 Track-‘n-trace and full automated reporting

 Economies of scale (driving down your variable costs)

 Improved quality and integrity

Turn a cost center into a profit center

 The possibility of attracting the use by departments who previously printed locally or outsourced

 More financial control and better accounting possibilities

Tracking and reporting of activities

Knowing exactly what your system is doing and why: reliable tracking is indispensable. Every organization has similar tracking concepts, but the specifics are unique to each organization.

Scriptura Engage ADF tracking concepts can be customized, so they speak the language of your organization.

 Track every step and every object

throughout the process using innovative ‘tracking concepts’. Predefined tracking concepts can be extended and next tracking concepts can be introduced. That way, Scriptura Engage adapts itself to your environment and not the other way around.

Figure 7: Scriptura Engage's tracking concept

Figure 8: Reporting on output jobs

3.

Company description

Inventive Designers is a Belgian software company, established in 1994. We create our own software for creating and delivering output and securing documents. Inventive Designers has many international clients, such as Bank of America, Nike, Siemens, Daimler … In Belgium FPS Finance, Flemish Tax Office, NOP, NEO, NISSE, NOCBE, NSSO, Belfius, Belgacom, De Lijn … belong to our customer portfolio. International governments include United Nations HQ (US), Government of Queensland (AUS) and the Canadian Department of National Defense (CA).

4.

Contact & more information

www.inventivedesigners.com [email protected] Telephone: +32 3 425 40 00

@inventivedes @scriptura

Inventive Designers

Sint-Bernardsesteenweg 552 2660 Hoboken

Belgium