Messaging and Directory Server software used around the world in the Government, Military, Aviation and Commercial sectors.
ACI Worldwide using Isode's M-Switch and M-Vault products for Electronic Document Delivery
Most organizations now have sophisticated Web sites, which enable customers to access a wide variety of information and online services. These organizations also have many requirements to send information out to their customers. In some cases this information can be quite informal (e.g., marketing mail shots) and in others there are strict legal requirements to send out the information (e.g., bank statements). In an increasingly online world it is highly desirable to handle this electronically. Where information needs to be delivered to customers, simply putting it on the Web site is generally inadequate as the information delivery is enterprise initiated and it will be undesirable (or even illegal where there are regulations governing delivery) to simply wait for the customer to visit the Web site...
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ACI Worldwide addresses this market with its e-Courier product. A typical recipient of an e-Courier document will see a statement or bill rendered in their email inbox. For example:
This statement is convenient for the customer, and enables the enterprise to save money, offer a new customer service, and have a platform for providing and marketing new customer services. Although the solution is very simple from a customer perspective, the e-Courier to implement this is a complex modular product. M-Switch and M-Vault are two of the modules which make up e-Courier. The rest of this case study looks at how M-Switch and M-Vault add value as a part of the e-Courier solution.
M-Switch
A typical bill or statement run requires a lot of documents (often millions) to be sent out in a short period of time, in order to meet legal requirements. e-Courier generates the bills as email messages, and then submits them locally to M-Switch. M-Switch's role is to deliver all of these messages out to recipients on the Internet. This function (SMTP to SMTP switching) is available in many products (commercial and open source). However, for a demanding application application such as e-Courier, most of these products are not suitable. M-Switch replaced a different switch used in earlier versions of e-Courier for a number or reasons including:
High throughput. M-Switch meets the target requirements for e-Courier. It is not the performance limiting component of the system, and has very reasonable hardware requirements.
- High throughput. M-Switch meets the target requirements for e-Courier. It is not the performance limiting component of the system, and has very reasonable hardware requirements.
- Cross platform. The same product is available on both Windows and Unix platforms.
- Strong management. The M-Console graphical management of the runtime queue is very useful for management of high volume document delivery.
- Efficient protocol implementation. Two functions provided by M-Switch
are important to the efficient operation of e-Courier.
- SMTP piplelining. This protocol feature, which enables SMTP to operate asynchronously and significantly increase submission.
- LMTP support. e-Courier uses an IMAP message store to archive messages (electronic documents). Support of LMTP (Local Message Transfer Protocol) significantly increases performance of local delivery from M-Switch to the document store.
- Handles large queues well. A system like e-Courier which sends out
large numbers of messages will often have a very large queue of messages.
Many SMTP switches do not perform well in this situation. M-Switches
in-memory queue gives a number of advantages:
- Intelligent scheduling. Multiple messages going to the same remote host can be scheduled to share a single connection, and retry strategy can be highly optimized.
- Process control. Work to process the queue can be managed by a fixed process set, to process messages at a configured load, without the system thrashing or taking more than its share of overall system resource.
- Submission back pressure. The queue size can be set, so that SMTP servers will exert back pressure to prevent further growth of the queue. This can be important where messages are being submitted very quickly and outbound delivery is constrained by network bandwidth.
- Highly Robust. M-Switch is a highly robust system, which is essential for an application such as e-Courier.
M-Vault
e-Courier uses M-Vault to store information on subscribers (customers receiving electronic documents delivered by e-Courier) and their accounts. e-Courier uses three basic approaches to storing data:
- LDAP Directory (M-Vault).
- Relational Database.
- Direct access to customer data, using various customizable approaches.
The exact combination will vary for a given e-Courier deployment, but typically LDAP (M-Vault) will be used to store the core customer data which is accessed by e-Courier as part of a document delivery run. Very often, this data will be synchronized with another location where the data is managed. There are a number of reasons for using LDAP:
- LDAP provides standardized data access and schema, which fits well with e-Courier's open standards approach.
- Security and PKI systems frequently use LDAP for handling data, and so there are standard schemas for this information, and use of LDAP can enable data sharing with other systems.
- LDAP can provide very high performance access to data, which is critical in support of high volume electronic document delivery.
- LDAP can provide easy schema extensibility, with minimal impact on applications accessing the directory. Changes to schema typically have wider impact with other database choices.
M-Vault provides the LDAP directory capabilities needed by e-Courier:
- High performance. Customer data and security parameters are accessed many times and at many points within e-Courier, and so high performance is critical. M-Vault is one of the fastest directory servers on the market.
- Large data volume. M-Vault scales to millions of entries, which is essential for e-Courier.
- Good management tools. M-Vault provides graphical management and configuration tools, which enable straightforward deployment by ACI professional services.
- Disaster recovery. In the event of system failure, M-Vault can be restored based on backups and logging data.
- Bulk load. High performance loading of external data is often required for synchronization with external data.
- Schema extensibility. e-Courier configurations need to be extended to deal with new customer requirements, and this is typically reflected in the directory by schema changes. It is important that it is straightforward to make these changes.
