Virtual printer

11/2/2020

In 2006 we created one of the first virtual printer to send documents for hybrid mail management, a printer compatible for PC and Mac.

With our new product Intelligent Hybrid Mail we choose to build a new Virtual printer. We started to develop a new postScript driver to improve documents processing.

How it works ?

First, you have a classic installer. Use it with administrator rights and install the virtual printer on your computer.

Then the idea is extremely simple. You write your letter, or you check a pdf document but instead of printing it on your local printer, you choose to print using our Virtual Printer.
Depending on the user configuration it can process automatically the document or forwards the user to the classic web experience.

The purpose of Intelligent Hybrid Mail is to reduce the costs and time processing.
No need to go to the post office, hit CTRL+P, choose our printer and that's it.
Our software may have already convinced you for large jobs but it fits also very well for simple documents to send.

Monitoring

30/1/2020

To monitor our infrastructure we choose one of the most popular monitoring software, ELK Stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.

At Nirva Software our cloud instances are managed with Docker swarm or Virtual machines on Proxmox.
When you manage dozens of machines you need a to have one entry-point to monitor all the infrastructure.

Monitoring an infrastructure is not magic, you need probes and data.
With our current infrastructure we gather:

application logs (apache, tomcat, database, ...) with Logstash
host server logs (hard disk, memory, cpu, server login...) with MetricBeats

Our monitoring team use all these metrics to build counters, alerts and visualization graphs. See some practical examples below.

Apache monitoring
Using the apache logs you can extract an approximate origin of the people connecting (or trying to connect) to your solution.
If your apache server handles 80% of its traffic with connections coming from countries where you don't have clients, a simple fail2ban solution will probably be interesting to block this traffic.
The apache server may act as a proxy, so a DDOS attack will also trigger alert if you monitoring your sever wisely.

e.g.: a test environment accessed mainly from France, United Kingdom and United States. Everything fine.

Host monitoring
Hard disk monitoring and memoy consumption are two important metrics for the hosts. Do we need to add more hard disk, do we need more memory ?

At a glance we identify which machine is becoming the bottleneck in the system and we can act quickly by adding new host in the network.

Conclusion
Monitoring is very important when setting up a service.
You may have the best software, but if you are not able to monitor it properly, then you will finnaly crash your system.

At NIRVA we have dedicated a team to control all our internal and cloud infrastructures. Every month plans are made to adapt the current monitoring solution.

This is why we decided to focus on setting up dedicated cloud environments for our customers. We take care of the infrastructure by managing the servers, and you take care of developing your business using your dedicated Intelligent Hybrid Mail instance.

API

20/1/2020

By design Intelligent Hybrid Mail exposes a REST connector.

We have published the documentaiton version 1.0.0 on https://api.cloud.nirva-software.com/

On the api web pages you will find three elements :

a html documentation
a swagger documentation
a json collection for Postman

Intelligent Hybrid Mail is a full REST JAVA application.
The documentation is dense and it will continue to growth.
Nevertheless, there's no need to be afraid, only three REST calls are necessary to create a delivery:

authenticate your user
create the job by sending the files
create the delivery based on the job

The video below shows you how to do it using PostMan.

And if you have question do not hesitate to contact the support team !

Intelligent PostGreen

9/1/2020

Since September 2019 we have opened our new cloud solution based on Intelligent Hybrid Mail only to a small set of client for testing purposes.

We are now proud to announce the official release of the software.
Intelligent PostGreen is now accessible to everyone.

Features
An extremly fast an attractive application.
Advanced document composition features.
All the channels accessible : mail, email, registered mail, electronic registered letter, ChorusPro
Multi-Channel active, one document can be delivered through multiple channels.

Contract
No changes !
You only pay for what you use, no monthly or yearly subscription.

Contact us if you want a demo of the solution.

Intelligent Hybrid Mail development continues to add more features...
Stay connected for more infos !

Multi channel invoices case study

9/12/2019

This company is a private storage facility.
They sent their clients invoices either with mails or emails depending on their clients preferences.

Project
This company contacted us to handle their invoices.
A 3rd party software generates a monthly batched file with all the elements to send and they do not have much flexibility here.
They have four issues :

sorting out the elements by delivery type
handling manually the mail documents
using an external software to send the emails
short deadline

The mail process was costing them time and people to do this task.
They use a dedicated software to handle their emails.
It was very difficult for them to track each shipment.

Result
Using Intelligent hybrid mail the PDF document uploaded by the client is splitted and based on the recipient information extracted from each shipment, we deliver through the appropriate channel.
To simplify the tracking we generate two deliveries for the job : one for the mails, one for the emails. This helps our client to analyse the volumes and prepare new communication to encourage their customers to move from paper to electronic deliveries.
They now have a unique solution to send both their mails and emails.

You can see a video below presenting the proof of concept we first show to this client.

Channel and file control

5/12/2019

With several years of experience, it has become clear to us that we need to check the elements sent by the client.

Using Intelligent Hybrid Mail it's possible to configure mandatory elements in files.

Channel is a technical entity: MAIL, EMAIL, REGISTERED_MAIL are channels.
Inside a channel we introduced mandatory fields called Requirements.
By default a requirement content is text extracted from the PDF.

With Intelligent Hybrid Mail you can create your own channels.

An administrator can create in a few clicks a channel MAIL_INVOICE with:

POSTAL_RECIPIENT_ADDRESS
INVOICE_NUMBER
CLIENT_ID

A validation procedure may be applied to each requirement (check number of digits, format using a regular expression....)

A shipment is elligible to a channel, only if all the requirements are valid.
As a result for the user :

INVOICE_NUMBER and CLIENT_ID are stored with the document.
So it's possible to search for a document using them.
it is certain that for each invoice sent we have a INVOICE_NB and a CLIENT_ID. A user can not override a channel requirements.

Intelligent Hybrid Mail allows the administrator a full flexibility in the channel creation. The requirements is a very small overview of what can be done about the creation of the channels.

Activation codes case study

25/11/2019

There are no better examples than real use cases to fully showcase the advantages of our solution.

A company sent their clients aregistered letter with their activation code to connect to their web site.

Project
This company contacted us to handle their documents by registered mail.
Their mail process was costing them time, money and hassle, manually matching mails to delivery dockets.
Moreover they do not have a dedicated solution to handle the registered mails after delivery, to confirm a good delivery or a failed delivery.

Result
Without specific development we manage to handle their activation codes mails.
Using the web interface they also manage to trace easily the letters. By default our solution stores elements for one year and by extracting some metadata in their documents (client number, transaction numbers...) we give this client a powerfull search interface.
Without involving his people in the printing and archiving taks, this improve the whole process and speeds up the payments. People are now focused on value-added tasks.

This company also use our software as a pure hybrid mail solution to handle Word documents sent using our Virtual Printer.

You can see a video below presenting the solution offered to this client.

About our new hybrid mail software

15/11/2019

When starting a two-year project to bring a new disruptive solution, one has to think about one's customers expectations.
So we made some research, discussed with partners and competitors and we computed numbers on all existing hybrid mail instances we manage.

During year 2018, our cloud softwares produced a total of 29 millions of documents for 4.500 clients.

Our diversity of customers allowed us to find the key features that should be developed in our product. Some numbers are significant :

85% of the total of documents processed are mail merged document.
70% of the total of documents processed by one client are based on the same template.
Digital channels (email, registered electronic letter, digital safe) show a very strong growth
If a web interface offers too many choices, then the user makes mistakes

Given the variety of our clients, the elements that emerge from our analyses should be applicable to all.

In order to provide the best solution we need :

An efficient PDF file management to split the jobs and compose the shipments.
A new web interface to guide users, 3 clicks or less should be necessary to complete an order
Document categorization and automatization is mandatory.

Intelligent Hybrid Mail will give the system administrator complete control :

To create channels, options and triggers by himself.
To manage the outputted files : apply margins, production marks.

What is hybrid mail software

8/11/2019

The classic definition of an hybrid mail software is an online service aim to collect files from end users and send them to a production centre to be printed and posted.
Using wikipedia you can find a definition of hybrid mail in an article from 2009.

Managing documents inside a company is not reduced to printing paper mail. Users need to send their communication through email, e-vault, electronic registered letters, external system archive, a message by phone....

Intelligent Hybrid Mail is the unique entry point to:

collect the jobs (using web interface, virtual printer, hot folder...)
split, assemble, compose the documents
deliver the shipments of one job through multiple channels
track the shipments (based on recipient address part, tracking number, date...)

Large volume mail outs are predictable in terms of timing and costs. Organisations easily allocate the costs associated with big operations.
But the small volumes are often set asside, and these volumes very quickly add up to significant costs if done manually.

Companies are switching to hybrid mail solution to improve efficiency, reduce time and costs, and because they have environmental concerns.

Intelligent Hybrid Mail is the solution to manage both small or large volumes. Every shipment is normalized and traceable in the software.
Our offer:

a mutualized cloud solution or a dedicated cloud solution (SAAS). We manage the servers on the cloud while you manage your clients.
a software you can install on your premises to build your own instance
a full autonomy, you will be amazed by the settings and customziations offered by our software
a complete API that allows integration with 3rd parties software

Intelligent Hybrid Mail by Nirva

4/11/2019

Nirva Software is a leading provider of software and cloud solutions to help organisations simplify the management of outgoing documents, reduce their costs and improve security.
Our clients include leading financial institutions (Banques Populaires, Europ Assistance, Aviva...), public organisations (the Belgian Ministry of Finances...) and service providers (Xerox, Arvato Services, Deutsche Post...) across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

We have got some really exciting news to share with you for the 10 years of PostOnDemand. We have decided to start a complete overhaul of all our products (server, web interface, virtual printer) to offer a coherent multi-channel hybrid mail software for 2020: Intelligent Hybrid Mail.

Three reasons you should follow us:

You want to restore simplicity in document processing with an easy to use solution
Big companies use our softwares for years
Intelligent hybrid mail is accessible for software vendors, print service providers, mail solution resellers

To learn more about how Intelligent Hybrid Mail can help you, stay tuned on linkedin or this website, we will share more information each week.