Compart: Document and Output Management

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Archiving in Spanish

What do you do when external support of your internal company archive is discontinued? The Spanish banking house Bancaja made a virtue of necessity. It rebuilt its former system from the ground up and added functions for Web-based document retrieval. The result: convenient access and greater customer satisfaction.

With approximately 5,000 employees in over 1,000 branches and one of the highest issue volumes of securities, Bancaja is among Spain’s leading financial institutions. Its archiving requirements are correspondingly high; every day they need to process countless amounts of banking data and store it in compliance with the law. At Bancaja, the daily transactions are consolidated in the database each night in multiple production runs and the resulting data is stored in the archive as financial statements, reports, account statements, etc. Data must be retained for up to five years. But archiving was posing more and more problems since the manufacturer of the bank’s archiving system had discontinued support some years before. A new solution was needed: a system into which all the previous data could be seamlessly transferred and that customers could access over the Internet, regardless of their Web architecture.

Beta 93 was chosen, a z/OS-based Output Management Software (OMS) system for processing high volumes of data and documents. Many major European banks use the Beta Systems solution. There are two components: the fast retrieval application for accessing the archive using functions like indexing and smart caching, and the Beta Web Enabler (BWE), a "bridge" to the Web client (see box for more on the technology). DocBridge Mill Toolkit, an application developed by the Compart Group for converting AFP to PDF files, supplements this software. DocBridge Mill Toolkit was added because Bancaja customers who retrieve their statements online were only able to see a pure text file. But the display differed greatly from the printed statement, something that many customers found strange, and occasionally disconcerting. So the new archiving system needed to have the same layout on the Web as the printed copy. The saved AFP files therefore had to be converted into a format customers could read, such as the popular PDF (Portable Document Format).

To clarify: AFP is the most used format for mass printing of invoices and account statements. But to display AFP files in their original layout and not just as a text file, users without AFP-compatible systems need to convert the files into a readable format. DocBridge Mill Toolkit from Compart offers them just this ability. The software supports nearly all relevant data formats from both the input and the output sides. Bancaja chose Compart because of its proven know-how particularly in data streams and formatting.

Automatic Authorization Checking

If, for example, a customer wants to view his current account status, he logs into the system via the Internet using his user name and password and then requests the desired information. The request is handled by the Web application server as a "download request". The server uses the Beta Web Enabler to access the archive to retrieve the desired document. The file is then transferred to the separate conversion server for conversion from AFP to PDF. The converted document is then returned to the client via the Web application server.

What’s important here is data security. In Bancaja’s case, authorization and authentication data is stored in a database. When a user logs on, the Web application server retrieves the user identification data and requests authentication from the database. Once authenticated, the authorization data is available as a binary object (BinaryLarge Object, BLOB). This data is conveyed through all the intermediate system layers to the archive system, where user access to the document is verified. A mode for just this purpose was installed in the software. Once verified, the document is extracted from the archive and passed to the Web application server.

For Bancaja, the new archive solution proved invaluable. Account statements and other documents are output on the Web client in the same format as they are printed. Yet another advantage: access times have dropped considerably, something the customers really appreciate, as the growing number of online accesses shows. Bancaja is logging about 2,500 Web visits a day, with the number expected to rise to 10,000 in the coming years.

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