Xenos IDS™ (Integrated Document Solution) Overview

The Business Need

It is not enough any more to merely print documents and send them to your customers. The proliferation of the Internet and various data interchange standards puts new demands upon organisations to provide a choice of delivery options and formats for this information. Besides the significant savings that are associated with the deployment of self-service channels, it has also become necessary to make the same information available for easy recall, thus driving savings in compliance and enhancing customer service levels.

What IDS Does

The Xenos IDS™ solution provides detailed control, formatting and delivery of information produced by any enterprise systems. It comprises of three main components, Xenos terminalONE™, Document Sciences xPression™ and Xenos infoWEB™, all of which are fully integrated to provide a seamless end to end process.

The core of the Xenos IDS solution is built using common, open, industry standards such as XML, Java and J2EE. It is designed to run on almost any platform type, is fast and offers huge scalability that will easily manage very large batch volumes, as well as more dynamic and ad-hoc document creation processes. Compatibility with common application server environments such as WebSphere, JBoss and BEA, make it ideal for deployment within Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and means that it is easily and cost effectively managed, both locally and remotely within a common application framework.

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How IDS Works

The Xenos IDS solution uses industry accepted design tools by Adobe (InDesign and DreamWeaver) and Microsoft (Word) to allow different parts of the business to reflect their document design requirements without extensive training and knowledge handover. The system adds functionality to these design tools by way of ‘Plug In’ technology. This enables users to quickly and effectively create highly personalised documents that use variables and business rules to determine the content and look of a document, whilst retaining tight control over any regulatory issues and ensuring the consistency of brand and layout.

Changes in the business that might require demands for new document types or the re-branding of existing lines can be accommodated quickly and easily. New documents can be visualised in formats such as PDF for submission and approval at each part of the design stage. This approach allows the business to immediately realise the wider operational benefits of an investment in this technology. It also helps to ensure consistency in their document production processes across disparate application environments at an early stage. In addition, a single solution approach means that a common skill set can be utilised for the design and deployment of future documents and that the company avoids the ‘silos of knowledge’ trap inherent in many other types of system.

The Xenos terminalONE component provides comprehensive connectivity, data translation, process flow and control functionality. This allows the solution to be quickly and easily integrated into core application environments and the process of document automation. The system is able to process any file output from any system or access any database without changes to existing systems. On receipt of this data it is able to map, re-format and verify the raw data to a common (XML-based) standard for ingestion into the core xPression document production engine.

xPression then produces the output in any industry standard print format which is controlled and routed by Xenos terminalONE for printing. At the same time xPression creates indexed PDF for ingestion into the Xenos infoWEB component. infoWEB effectively secures and publishes the documents for access by the appropriate user or customer based upon access permissions. These documents are accessed for view and print via a web-based portal.

With Xenos infoWEB, the user logs on and is validated by either an existing web application or by the in-built security already present in the solution. This authentication then validates the user against a list of documents that they are allowed to access. The user is then provided access to his/her list of available documents.