At Opus Trust Marketing we have invested heavily in highly available and diversely routed communication links so as to avoid any single point of failure, whilst providing customers with the ability to transfer data to us 24/7/365. We work with our customers to evaluate the most appropriate communication method to be used well in advance of go live. In the main this can be over a dedicated fixed link or over the Internet. Typically the Internet is the preferred carrier at the moments as this is often already supported by clients’ existing infrastructure; avoiding the expense of setting up dedicated communication links.

Security and integrity of data is taken very seriously at Opus Trust Marketing, not just during the file transfer stages but also once customer data is in our possession. As such Opus utilises a number of security measures to protect systems and customers' data from misuse and malicious attack. These systems are supported 24/7 by our in-house IT teams and also undergo regular security and compliancy audits by external parties.
When data is transferred between Opus and customers a secure and robust method is agreed in advance. Typically this involves the use of unique accounts, pre-shared keys or certificates together with combinations of file, session and network layer encryption for example:

• VPN
• SFTP, FTPS & SSL
• PGP encrypted files

Data files are then received onto staging servers located within a secure DMZ environment before being automatically relocated to Opus Trust Marketing's internal systems for processing. A file retention period is also agreed to ensure that used data is automatically purged from Opus' systems.

File transfer verification is performed by the system that initiated the transfer. Opus has systems in place to ensure that only successful file transfers are processed and that no duplicate files are processed. The format for reporting is agreed with customers in advance and will usually detail the number of mail pieces for each data stream received within a given period.

Opus' in-house document composition teams are specially trained IT staff, with an in depth knowledge of file formats; skilled in setting up automated workflows and ensuring the smooth running of applications in a production environment. The team have significant experience in being able to receive output from customers' systems in a wide variety of different formats, whether it is print ready or raw data.

Example formats include but are not limited to: AFP, PCL, PS, PDF or VPS. Using a customer's supplied data report the incoming data is reconciled at the point of receipt and an email report sent which confirms relevant values associated with the file (e.g. number of records received, time of arrival). We then apply production security marks and undertake other processing e.g. Mailsort / Cleanmail.

Example formats include but are not limited to: ASCII, sequential, CSV, tab delimited, flat text fixed widths and a wide number of compressed file types.
Data is received in an agreed format with established naming conventions for each file and field. Opus run the files against predefined scripts to determine the number of mail pieces, pages or value of each file and an automated reconciliation report is sent to the customer. Data is then transferred to the document composition tools. Depending on stationery format and specific criteria we merge/spool files into the most efficient postal sortation. The composition tools then map data items, e.g. text, fonts, business rules and apply any white space messages to the supplied data to generate the document output with production security marks to the agreed template. With files now at optimum size for Mailsort and foreign Mailsort, we transfer them to systems for Mailsort processing.