Mail merge

1/12/2020

In November we added a new feature to the product Intelligent Hybrid Mail.
It's possible now to use data files (CSV files or flat files) to create mailings in the application.
Your data file will contain the address and the application will check the address validity.

There is no mandatory header, no mandatory format.
When we create a service, we will fetch your existing CSV columns to build a correct address.

Documation trade fair

21/8/2020

Nirva Software will be present on booth B70 at the Information Management and Documentary Process Exhibition held in Paris Porte de Versailles on September 22nd, 23rd and 24th. http://www.documation.fr

You can now schedule an appointment with our team using the form below.

Meeting us at Documation

* Indicates required field

Company *

FirstName *

LastName *

Email *

Mobile phone *

Day *

Hour *

Subject of the meeting *

The information provided is not shared with third parties and is only used to make contact for the Documation trade show. At any time you can request their deletion.

Submit

Packing channel

10/8/2020

With this channel, documents are printed and folded, but instead of franking each individual document, a package is sent to a person who will then distribute each fold.

Sorting and separation options facilitate the distribution process.

Use case

We can present here two use case of this channel on the PostGreen cloud.

This channel is used by condominium property managers. In order to save on operating costs, they choose to have all the documents delivered to the caretaker of the building. The latter then deposits the mail in the letterboxes of the addressees. The mails are sorted by name in the parcel.

This channel is also used within companies for which we print their employees' pay slips. We send a parcel with unsealed envelopes. The managers can then add the Ticket Restaurant to the envelopes before distributing them to the employees. Documents are sorted by activity (Management/R&D/Support/Finance...) and by name in the parcels.

Fallback Channel

29/7/2020

We introduce here a new feature of Intelligent Hybrid Mail.

The objective is to reprocess automatically a shipment if we get back an error status for its delivery.

The problem

You have created a service to send your invoices using the EMAIL channel.
It is not unlikely that when sending a few hundred emails you will receive errors (full mailbox, incorrect email address...). You will then have to deal with each element.

The solution

With Intelligent Hybrid Mail it is possible to configure a fallback channel for your shipments.
For example, when shipments sent by EMAIL channel come back with a specific error code, then the application will send again the documents using the MAIL channel automatically.
The error codes are defined by the system administrator. And then in your Service creation you can activate or not the fallback channel.

Note that this applies to all existing channel types.

Virtual printer

11/2/2020

In 2006 we created one of the first virtual printer to send documents for hybrid mail management.

With our new product Intelligent Hybrid Mail we choose to build a new Virtual printer for PC. 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.

No need to go to the post office, hit CTRL+P, choose our printer and that's it.

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.

<<Previous