Press Release
- Date:
- Thursday, June 01, 2000
- Contact:
- David Peikin
- Phone:
- (301) 918-0818
- Email:
- G1@schwartz-pr.com
DOC1 Significantly Expands Electronic Bill Presentation and Payment (EBPP) and Electronic Statement Presentation (ESP) Functionalities
XML output, HTML and Enhanced PDF Enable DOC1 Customers to Create and Manage Dynamic Customer Documents for Web Delivery
Lanham, MD — Group 1 Software (Nasdaq: GSOF) announced today that it has significantly enhanced its DOC1 product to address the tremendous growth in Electronic Bill Presentation and Payment (EBPP) and Electronic Statement Presentation (ESP). DOC1 now generates XML output, and its PDF supports bookmarks and embedded URL links to facilitate deployment of EBPP and ESP solutions. DOC1 is the fastest way to produce dynamic, easy-to-read, personalized business documents such as bills, statements, and letters for print, electronic presentment, and Internet delivery. DOC1 will also generate dynamic HTML in its forthcoming version 4.0 release.
With DOC1's XML output, EBPP and ESP vendors can more easily take in the format, structure, and content of a customer's business data. This will eliminate the need to scrape print image files or create additional programs to tag data. DOC1's customers can now more easily deploy EBPP and ESP solutions in thick or thin consolidator models or biller direct models. When producing documents for both print and on-line delivery, users only need to access raw business data once and create and maintain one set of business rules.
London Life, OSG Billing and Incomnet are among the businesses currently using DOC1 to present real-time bills and statements to their customers. "DOC1's natively-generated XML will enable a quicker implementation of our EBPP solution by eliminating the need to reformat to another printstream, thereby removing several processing steps," said Victoria Cashion, Systems Analyst at Incomnet. "By using DOC1-generated XML, Incomnet can offer a higher level of customer service to our business-to-business customers."
"This release will facilitate increased interoperability with leading e-billing service providers, EBPP distribution channels and payment portals," said Alan Slater, General Manager of Group 1's Electronic Document Systems Division. Slater added, "Since DOC1 utilizes customers' raw billing data, we are well upstream in the billing process from conventional EBPP providers. An additional unique advantage for DOC1's customers is the flexibility to add highly targeted conditional marketing messages and data-driven graphics to their customer communication."
"One of the biggest hurdles to implementing a successful EBPP project is gaining access to and sharing data across applications," said Rita Knox, Gartner Analyst. "XML allows companies to share and use common data elements across applications, thus eliminating the need to manually interpret data from one application to the next. Using an XML-enabled document creation product greatly enhances a company's ability to automate data exchange and implement value chain integration," added Knox.
The DOC1 system allows dynamic document applications to be developed in a WYSIWYG environment on a Windows NT workstation. The DOC1 production engine can run under MVS, Windows NT, Windows 2000, UNIX (Sun Solaris, HP/UX and AIX, DEC UNIX), Open VMS, OS/400 or PC DOS. DOC1 is completely printer independent and produces AFP, Metacode, HP/PCL, PostScript, HTML, XML, PDF and line data output.
Group 1 Software is a leading provider of software for data quality, database marketing, electronic document composition applications, and direct marketing and mailing efficiency applications. Group 1 supports MVS, VSE, AS/400, UNIX (including Linux), Windows NT, Windows 2000 and other operating systems and various computers. Group 1 has offices throughout the United States and in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Continental Europe. The company is also represented in Latin America, Asia, and Australia.