METAPOSTA is an ambitious project included in the Basque Digital Agenda 2015, whose purpose is to offer an internet letterbox and strongbox service to citizens in order that they may both receive and store all kinds of documents in a secure and permanent way.

Core to the project is the development of “email strongbox in the Internet” where personal documents are stored. There are similar initiatives in other parts of the world such as eBooks in Denmark, De-Mail and E-Postbrief in Germany, Agosp in Australia or My eCitizen in Singapore, but this is the only service in Spain with these features and functionalities.

The goal of the system is to provide citizens and companies alike with safe and permanent storage of important valued documents electronically. The service provided is most definitely of commercial interest to both industry and the services sector in Euskadi, proven today by the uptake of more than 800.000 documents among its users.

From the very beginning of this project, Compart, a leading provider of Output Management Software and Services (OMS) teamed with METAPOSTA, delivering those special tools required to enable any source data to be converted into different output formats. 

Throughout the development phase it was important to ensure that within this pioneering project, all documentation formats are compatible and interoperable, thus assuring increased flexibility for the integration of new issuers. “To achieve this – Rafael Gárate, IT Manager of METAPOSTA, comments – “it is essential to have a proven product such as Compart’s DocBridge Mill that converts AFP bank formats into PDF/A, as this is currently the standard for the long-term archiving of electronic documents.”. 

Secure virtual space for every kind of document 

METAPOSTA users are both enterprises and citizens who open a virtual account in order to receive official and private documents in their special strongbox. This includes all documents they require electronically. They can sign documents and register their documents in folders, and also sort by relevance to better manage them. The access to all documentation from any mobile device or PC only requires a user-friendly interface compatible with most common operating systems: Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, mobile environments (Android, iPhone and Blackberry). The format type is diverse and will support the gradual adoption of various new document formats and graphics, highlighting: PDF and XML. Of course it supports the regulated set of formats for electronic administrative procedures as stipulated by the Basque Government.

According to Rafael Garate, “Compart has distinguished itself as a key driver for the project, providing a very flexible conversion between multiple formats and thus allows us to streamline our operations with customers. It is part of our integration architecture for asynchronous with senders via EDITran or SFTP, with the file conversion option AFP to PDF. Cognizant of the challenges faced by constantly evolving technologies and standards, METAPOSTA has every confidence in Compart to continually innovate and enhance its products and services”.

In the future, METAPOSTA will come to replace traditional postal mail as the service  can easily provide all the same services and features, but more effectively. The service even provides a free customer support center. It is funded by those entities that send messages and documents, just the same as in traditional postal mail. The recipient of the correspondence incurs no cost, as the costs are covered by the issuers of the mail.