TECHNICAL OVERVIEW 2021

Technical Overview

Scale the ConversationTM

 Contents
Executive Summary 3
Product Overview 4
Enterprise Customer and Business Communications Management 4
Use Cases 5
On-Demand 5
Interactive 5
Batch Capability 6
Collaboration 7
Deployment Flexibility 8
Pure Cloud 8
Hybrid Cloud 9
Designing, Testing and Producing Communications 10
Template Designer 10
Layout Editor 11
Styleset Editor 11
Forms Overlay 11
Device Preview 12
Automated Email Testing 12
Data Modeler 13
Smart Components 13
Content Management System 14
Project Approval Workflow 14
Assembly Engine 15
Post Processing 15
Email/SMS Delivery 15
Archive Delivery 15
Migration Studio 16
Product Architecture 17
Logical Architecture 17
Process Flows 18
Product Components 19
API 19
API Functional Areas 19
The Conversation Cloud 20
Conversation Cloud Marketplace 20
Integrated Solutions 21
Conversation History 22
Security Environment 23
Minimum Requirements 23
Management Information 25

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 2

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 2
 Executive Summary
SmartCOMM™ from Smart Communications™ is the market’s leading SaaS
Customer Communications Management (CCM) software solution. Recognized
as the strategic leader by leading analyst firms including IDC, Forrester, Gartner
and Aspire, SmartCOMM was designed to meet the digital needs of the 21st-
century customer, delivering the most advanced customer communications
more efficiently and securely than ever. With SmartCOMM, you’ll collaborate
better with stakeholders, gain greater flexibility in deployment, and lower your
total cost of owning an enterprise CCM solution.

SmartCOMM brings distinct and tangible benefits to business users, communication designers,
IT teams and customer experience professionals who manage customer communications and
orchestrate customer conversations for the world’s leading enterprises.

SmartCOMM Delivers:

• Customer-centricity, by transforming • Cost savings from a reduction or elimination of IT

communications to relevant and personalized infrastructure needed to support CCM operations
customer conversations via the channels
customers prefer • Flexibility to bring enterprise-class
communications distributed to many parts of your
• Business user control over content and business from a single unified solution
communications for the people who drive your
communications strategy • Speed to market and enhanced efficiency through
intelligent and scalable communications template
• Deployment flexibility, allowing customers design, content management and process
to leverage the solution as a pure-cloud or workflow
hybrid-cloud and meeting internal regulatory
requirements • Compliance with audit, tracking and management
to ensure communications meet local, national
• Greater agility, allowing your business to shorten and industry regulations
the time to develop new products and services
along with the associated communications

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 3

 Product Overview
Enterprise Customer and Business Communications Management
SmartCOMM is a highly configurable and feature-rich application that has been designed to be deployed as a
multi-tenant SaaS or hybrid-cloud customer communications solution.

END USER
Voice
Web

Data Capture Draft Editor Negotiation

Data
PRODUCTION Mobile
Admin System Communications
</> {;}
CRM BPM ECM EAP ...... XML JSON

</>
Content Assembly Content Management
Core Systems
Email XML
of Record

Archive
DESIGN

Print Social

Data Modeler Template Designer Figure 1—SmartCOMM high-level overview

SmartCOMM enables non-technical users to take control of the creation and maintenance of sophisticated customer
communications, empowering organizations to be more agile, quick-to-market and less dependent on IT resources.
Business users are able to create or apply all of the building blocks of a communication, including branding, content,
references to data items, business assembly rules and adding multiple channels. SmartCOMM supports:

• Intelligent data capture and controlled editing that • Document collaboration for the negotiation of
provide business users with the means of generating high-value documents between multiple parties,
on-demand or interactive correspondence. providing a secure negotiation environment in
These services can be easily integrated into core the cloud. A secure container, called a ‘Docbox’,
business applications that can be used to generate represents a single source of truth, containing both
correspondence throughout the customer lifecycle. the latest document version and all prior versions.
Each version has a complete ‘track change’ history
• The integration of customized business applications which attributes comments, edits and actions to
(such as CRM, policy administration systems, etc.) individuals. Changes made in external programs
across an enterprise. Once integrated, these systems such as Microsoft Word can be incorporated into
can send requests to SmartCOMM via RESTful web the collaborative document with the ability to see
services to generate correspondence immediately changes made since the last revision.
or through a batch process. They can also receive
the final output, editable communications and/or • Rapid integration through a rich and varied
status messages from SmartCOMM for additional Application Programming Interface (API). As well as
processing, if required. a broad API enabling seamless integration with the
cloud-based platform, all client-side components
• Multiple formats and multiple channels, leveraging offer their own API interface which allows them to
the flexibility of JSON and XML at its core. During the be embedded within web-based or native Microsoft
communication generation process, the SmartCOMM Windows applications (see API and Conversation
engine automatically renders the output with Cloud sections of this document for more details).
channel-specific characteristics. As a result, content It also comprises a diverse set of web services
can easily be re-used across channels, and new which can invoke discrete SmartCOMM services,
channels can be subsequently added with little covering areas such as the content management
impact. Post-processing, including job scheduling, system (CMS), communications generation, user
sorting, collation, the application of barcodes, and management and collaboration.
final output delivery.

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 Use Cases
The SmartCOMM service is utilized in four main business scenarios or use cases, namely on-demand, interactive,
batch and collaboration.

On-Demand
For the on-demand use case, a single communication is generated in response to an incoming request. An
example of this would be the generation of a PDF quote at the end of a web application for auto insurance.
Requests are simply issued to the SmartCOMM API and a completed communication is returned in the response,
making for fluid integration with third-party applications, creating a clean, loosely coupled architecture.

A number of validated integrations exist between SmartCOMM and these customer management systems
including Guidewire InsuranceSuite®, Vlocity, Pega and Salesforce Sales, Service, Health and Financial Service
Clouds.

This use case typically applies to straight-through processing as described above, or the communication being
presented in an interactive manner for further personalization - described below. In addition, regular, high-volume
use cases are best handled by our batch service described further below.

Interactive
During customer engagement, customer-facing staff – either in a contact center, branch, or in-store environment
– need to customize or interact with the communication, before finalization, making the communication more
relevant and personalized.

SmartCOMM gives agents or other authorized users the ability to collect specific information in real time, place it
within communications and then further personalize draft communications with approved shared content as well
as direct user input before delivering to the channel of their choice. The interactive use case breaks down into two
subcomponents which can deployed together or independently.

Draft Editor is an embeddable HTML/JavaScript/CSS module that supports the interactive use case by providing
a word processor-like interface to an assembled, but not yet finalized communication. Agents, CSRs or other
authorized users can customize the communication based on their interaction with, and knowledge of, the
end customer to produce a highly personalized, on-brand communication. Critically, only those elements of the
communication that relate to the agent’s role are exposed for editing, with the rest of the communication being
viewable, but locked down to prevent other unauthorized changes. Organizations that deploy Draft Editor gain
significant benefits in reducing agent call-handling time, as the draft communication is preassembled from the
template using only those fragments relevant to the customer. Run-time choices may be provided to the user which
further reduce the time and effort to produce high-quality, and personalized communications for each recipient.

Figure 2 – SmartCOMM Draft Editor

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 Data Capture Capability allows organizations
to both capture and augment existing customer
data before any communication is assembled.
This intelligent capture process can be initiated
directly by the customer through adaptive
interview capabilities as part of SmartIQ™.
Alternatively, data can be captured natively
within the SmartCOMM Data Capture Editor to
only request data that is required to complete a
given communication, focusing agents’ time on
just the most relevant information.

Figure 3 – Data Capture Capabilities

Batch Capability
SmartCOMM’s batch capabilities allow the production of high volumes of communications, typically in an end-
of-month / end-of-year processing scenario such as renewals or other high-volume applications. SmartCOMM’s
unique batch architecture empowers organizations to elastically scale up resources to meet peak demands
and mission-critical batch windows for these large batches of communications – a significant benefit over
traditional legacy on-premise or managed service offerings in the market, which require pre-provisioning of
hardware or managed service capacity to account for peak volumes yet sit idle for the majority of the time.

Figure 4 – SmartCOMM Batch Job Processing

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 Collaboration
The negotiation of high-value documents between multiple parties is typically carried out today by exchanging
Word documents over email. The resulting issues include uncertainty over who has the latest version of the
document and whether changes have been made with track changes turned on or off.

Figure 5 – SmartCOMM Collaboration Activity within a timeline

Collaboration within SmartCOMM addresses these issues by providing a secure negotiation environment in the
cloud. The secure container, called a ‘Docbox’, represents a single source of truth, containing both the latest version
and all prior document versions. Each version has a complete ‘track change’ history which attributes all comments,
edits and actions to individuals.

All authorized parties then negotiate on the document content, optionally adding edits, comments and
attachments until such time as the document is deemed to be finalized, at which point a final secure PDF is created
and the Docbox becomes locked down.

Documents are data-driven, meaning that they contain embedded data items, such as contract values, contract
dates and party names and addresses. Even during negotiation, the tagging of these data items is preserved,
meaning that once negotiation is complete, a downstream system can extract the values of the negotiated data
items. These can then be fed into downstream systems, such as CRM or administration systems.

All parties then have the ability to negotiate on the document content, optionally adding edits, comments and
attachments until such time as the document is deemed to be finalized. Versions of a document in mid-negotiation
can be extracted from a Docbox and updated in Microsoft Word, and then seamlessly merged directly back into the
negotiated document.

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 Deployment Flexibility
SmartCOMM has a range of deployment configurations that can be broadly divided into two categories – Pure
Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. The choice of appropriate option will typically depend on an organization’s attitude
towards data residency and control of data location, juxtaposed against the benefits of a truly serverless, SaaS-
based approach.

Pure Cloud
The first of its kind in the enterprise CCM market, our Pure Cloud deployment option was architected directly into
the cloud platform as a true, zero-footprint, multi-tenant SaaS service, free of any of the limitations incumbent upon
a managed service or on-premise option. Benefits of the Pure Cloud deployment option include:

Elastic Scalability - Scale to meet peak output demands without the high cost of ownership of procuring hardware
only for maximum requirements and avoiding idle utilization of resources.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership - No hardware to procure and maintain combined with the cost savings from
eliminating tech stack maintenance and installation and software/hardware updates.

Speed / Agility - The ability to bring new projects, products and innovation to market quickly and efficiently.

Higher Availability / Limited Downtime - With a blue/green deployment approach, seamless switching between
multiple production instances significantly reduces the required downtime for upgrades and enhancements.

Regional Data Residency - Choose from a number of available global data centers (including Amazon Web Services
(AWS) data centers) to meet local data regulations.

Browser-based Platform - Leverage a full-suite browser-based template design and editing experience –
eliminating the need for costly hardware and software maintenance.

Continuous Innovation - Enhanced options for customers to benefit from new innovation and releases, as well as
to select current versions to run on each tenancy.

Template
Designers Multi-tenant SaaS

Design Interactive
Content On-demand
Firewall Admin Batch
Existing
Customer
Business
Data
Applications
Payload
Web Email

Interactive | On-demand | Batch Print Mobile

Business Users

</>

XML
Voice
Archive
Figure 6 - SmartCOMM Pure Cloud Deployment Configuration Social

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 Hybrid Cloud
This option leverages the use of a software virtual appliance which is connected to the SmartCOMM tenancy. Our
hybrid-cloud option is designed for the needs of organizations that want to benefit from cloud template design
and testing but have stricter sensitivity or regulatory oversight over the residency of the customer data used to
personalize the communications that are generated. Benefits of the Hybrid Cloud approach include:

Controlled data pathway – Customers balance keeping customer data within their corporate firewalls with the
benefit from utilizing a cloud-based template environment.

Customer-controlled updates – Gain more flexibility and control over the upgrade cycle and cadence for the
hosted appliance.

Strategic pathway to the cloud – For customers making the move from a legacy or traditional on-premise provider,
the hybrid-cloud option can often serve as an initial, sometimes interim, step in a longer-term move to the cloud.

With the appliance, all customer data is kept within the customer’s defined security mandate (i.e. within on-premise
firewall, or deployed into a customer’s own VPC) and facilitates the hosting of all three customer communication
use cases (On Demand, Interactive and Batch).

The Appliance: The appliance is a software virtual machine supplied as a ready-to-run downloadable image that
can be deployed either on-premise or in a customer’s VPC using popular hypervisor/VPC solutions including Docker,
VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, and KVM. Its purpose is to handle the
CPU, network and data storage activities associated with producing output while allowing the SaaS service to manage
the configuration and provide template authoring capabilities, described in more detail in the next section.

AWS
Template
Designers

Appliance
Multi-tenant SaaS
Design Content Admin

Existing Firewall
Customer
Business
Data
Applications
Payload
Interactive | On-demand | Batch
Web Email

Print Mobile

Business Users

</>

XML
Voice
Archive
Social

Figure 7 – SmartCOMM Hybrid Cloud Deployment Configuration

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 Designing, Testing & Producing Communications
On-demand, interactive and batch use cases rely on services grouped into three areas: design, content and data
mapping, which are described and illustrated below.

Template Designer
SmartCOMM puts the business user in control
of content, data items and assembly rules for
templates. Accessible from a 100% SaaS-based
browser environment, Template Designer provides
authoring capability and assembly logic rules
definition. SmartCOMM guides designers through
the rules definition process, letting them select
shared content from the Content Management
System.

Using Template Designer, users can see a channel-

independent view of the content and logic rules.
These provide a clear layout of the document
assembly process, previewing the output results for
each channel against sample data and responsive
Figure 8 - SmartCOMM Template Designer
design.

Template Designer gives users the flexibility to create a single template that serves multiple languages, channels,
idioms, jurisdictions and brands, all within a single template and caters for different branding to variations in the
content of the communications by applying the final look and feel only when all of the data necessary for an
individual communication has been collected and processed.

Business users are able to leverage SmartCOMM’s unique concept of Editions, which offers an intuitive mechanism
to split design components into multiple variants or layers (Editions) which will be dynamically selected for inclusion
into output by SmartCOMM at compose-time. This allows business users to create units of content which will
respond appropriately based on language, channel, idiom, jurisdiction, and brand.

Figure 9 - SmartCOMM Editions capabilities

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 Business users can control various aspects of document design with specific interfaces including:

Layout Editor: Defines the structure of a

communication, using a series of “injection”
points which define where content (e.g.,
headings, footers, sidebars and the main body
flow of the template) can be inserted.

Figure 10 – SmartCOMM Layout Editor

Styleset Editor: Defines the textual

presentation of the communication. Often, an
organization will have one styleset resource
that reflects corporate branding and is re-
used across their entire template portfolio,
allowing them to make global changes to
the look and feel in one place, also known as
the SmartCOMM shared content capability.
Stylesets contain multiple “Editions,” ensuring
that they reflect variations across brand,
channel, language, jurisdiction and idiom
where relevant.

Figure 11 – SmartCOMM Styleset Editor

Forms Overlay: To allow users to take

complex forms or other content that have
already been designed in another tool and
embed them into SmartCOMM. Once in
SmartCOMM, they can be augmented with
data items to make them truly dynamic.

Figure 12 – SmartCOMM Forms Overlay

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 Template Designer also lets template authors see real-time previews of exactly how their HTML communications will
look in various device and channel formats with its native preview capability. This capability becomes particularly
important when designing emails that leverage responsive design and need to change to dynamically respond to a
customer’s mobile device, as shown below.

Figure 13 – Responsively-designed emails previewed in SmartCOMM Template Designer

Device Preview
Device Preview allows you to view exactly
what an email preview will look like on a
mobile device through the scan of a short-
lived hyperlink embedded in a readable
QR code. This allows template designers
to be able to test HTML responsive design
in real time across multiple devices.
Figure 14 – Device Preview

Automated Email Testing

To automate the laborious manual process of
email testing, SmartCOMM provides an out of the
box integration with Litmus so you can build and
test your email communication in 70+ clients in
real time. Any template changes can be viewed
in real time inside your preview mode. Using the
Litmus previews integrated within SmartCOMM,
you can catch potentially costly errors - and fix
them - before releasing communications. Your
communications designers can scroll through
sample transaction data and immediately view the
results in Litmus preview mode (additional license
Figure 15 – Litmus Preview mode dashboard in SmartCOMM
from Litmus required).

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 Data Modeler
Data is modeled with provided data modelling tools to enable the definition of the format of the incoming
transaction data (XML or JSON) that is supplied by the upstream application and core admin systems. As part of this
definition process, the user can rename data elements so that they are more business user-friendly when presented
to the template authors in Template. Moreover, additional elements can be calculated in real time to expose values
that are not included in the data but are required when creating the document. Once completed, the resulting
Data Model is stored within the Content Management System typically for re-use by many templates along with all
of the other resources needed for template production.

Smart Components
Smart Components is an extensible framework for assisting both designers and business users in creating rich and
engaging content via drag-and-drop modules. In an HTML context, they enable rich web components, including
data-aware image carousels, video and audio controls, social media toolbar, accordion widgets, lightboxes, and
sidebar menu functions to be added via drag-and-drop to a template by business users, without requiring the
users to have an understanding of the underlying technologies. Smart Components also allows formerly advanced
content or frequently-used functions to be packaged into user friendly components, available across all channels.

Specifically, Smart Components make it easier for our customers to achieve the following:

• Embed rich and engaging content into mobile apps and full HTML websites

• Deliver a more highly personalized experience via components that can be driven by data items and
wrapped in logic

• Enhance interactive, content-centric communications, such as on-boarding communications, notifications

and terms of business

Figure 16– SmartCOMM Smart Components

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 Content Management System
The Content Management System (CMS) is the repository where all communication templates and their associated
resources are securely and centrally held under version control. Using SmartCOMM, it is possible to view current,
previous, and even withdrawn versions of templates and other components. In addition, when a new version is
created, SmartCOMM generates and applies an incremented version number as well as unique resource version ID
that is used to identify the new resource within the content repository.

Figure 17 - Relationship Map showing content dependencies

The SmartCOMM CMS includes individual audit history and metadata about all the resources held within it.
Additionally, references are maintained between all of the different linked components, allowing a graphical view
to be generated for assessing the impact of making a change. The benefit of the impact analysis is the ability to
dramatically reduce the time associated with testing a new release, allowing the testing team to focus on just
templates and components that are impacted by any given change.

The CMS can also be interrogated programmatically using an extensive RESTful Web Service API. This allows
organizations to load and manage the CMS with content from other systems, which provide a content syndication
capability from Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.

Project Approval Workflow:

Sitting on top of the CMS is a robust and flexible
project approval workflow process for project
managers to create an approval cycle for the
collection of related resources. Project approval
workflow supports parallel and serial approval
models and provides a complete visual history of all
changes to the project during its lifecycle.

Figure 18 – Project Approval Dashboard

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 14

 Assembly Engine
The SmartCOMM communications generation process consumes business data from external sources and then
applies business logic, customer profile information and channel-aware processing to assemble graphically rich,
highly variable multiple channel business communications.

For on-demand, interactive and batch use cases, the process starts by receiving transactional data as XML or JSON
input from an external source. Once received, the SmartCOMM engine applies processing rules to determine the
appropriate template, channel(s), language, idiom, jurisdiction and distribution mechanism for the communications
created.

On creation of the final communications from the data request, the delivery process can either be triggered
immediately or it can be invoked based upon an event, such as the number of transactions currently being held or
at a preset time during the day, week and/or month.

SmartCOMM currently supports the following formats:

• Print - including Adobe PostScript, IBM AFP, PDF and Interactive PDF

• Web and Digital - including HTML, Email, SMS, Social output including WhatsApp

• Images - including TIFF

• Other channel output including Fax, Microsoft PowerPoint

• XML-based output and variations including WordML, ExcelML and VoiceML

Because SmartCOMM is built on XML, it is well positioned to adopt and implement new channels as they emerge.

SmartCOMM generates multiple channels from a single communication request. For example, from one request, it is
possible to generate a PostScript file for print, a PDF for archive, an XML file to handshake with external systems and
an SMS message.

Post Processing
SmartCOMM’s post processing capabilities enable deliverable output to be manipulated to fit all downstream
requirements. Capabilities extended include the ability to create Mail Packs (collation of multiple documents),
Configurable Job Scheduling, Output Sorting, the inclusion of Barcodes and OMR Marks in all formats typically
expected, processed and bundled according to Print Service Bureau expectations.

SmartCOMM has the native capability to deliver content to a customer’s existing SMTP and SMTP to SMS gateways
for Email / SMS Delivery and also supports the delivery of Archive copies to a 3rd party system in a variety of
different ways.

Email/SMS Delivery
SmartCOMM leverages a customer’s current infrastructure by brokering generated e-mails and SMS message
through their existing STMP and SMTP to SMS gateways. Emails can either be HTML or plain text and can include
variable header details such as “To”, “From”, “cc”, “bcc” and “Subject”. These values are passed to the Output
Processor using channel job properties which are typically derived from the transaction data.

Archive Delivery
SmartCOMM supports the delivery of an archive copy to a 3rd party system, including all of the necessary indexing
metadata, through a custom archive handler. The metadata is specific to each document as it is derived from the
transaction data. Due to the open architecture nature of the solution, it can also be integrated with any archive
system that has an open API.

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 Migration Studio
Migration Studio is an additional, optional module of the SmartCOMM platform. Migration Studio is a suite of
capabilities designed to facilitate the migration of customer communication outputs to SmartCOMM templates.
The migration from legacy communication applications can be a time-consuming and arduous process, with
many manual steps as well as manual recreation of these mission-critical communication templates. Migration
Studio significantly reduces the costs, time and complexity inherent with these migrations. The suite of capabilities
empowers users to intelligently migrate mission critical customer and business communications - including
text, styling, images, and tables from legacy communications platforms - and automatically re-creates them in
SmartCOMM.

Migration Studio does more than simply recreate communications from customer output to SmartCOMM
templates. Instead, it takes advantage of the four-layer model described in Figure 20 and logically separates the
content, styling, layouts and data models, automatically creating corresponding resources in SmartCOMM or
allowing users to choose to map to existing resources. This process maximizes the re-use of the resources across
templates in SmartCOMM and significantly reduces their ongoing maintenance.

Figure 19 – Migration Studio

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 16

 Product Architecture

Four-Layer Model
At its core, SmartCOMM has been designed and
developed to allow business users to control the content,
data items and assembly rules for the specification of
the communication templates. This approach allows
the more technical aspects of the process–such as style
design and data model construction–to be handled by Behavior
technically-oriented users. Addressing the fundamental
problem of inefficiency in the creation and maintenance
of communications, this division of labor at the very
foundation of SmartCOMM architecture provides an agile
method of creating and maintaining the communication
templates. The resulting collaboration between the different
stakeholders ensures a much faster communications
development cycle.

The SmartCOMM Four-Layer Model focuses on the re- Presentation

usability of components and sharing of the template
building process between the different stakeholders.

The components of the Four-Layer Model – Data, Content,

Presentation and Behavior (or assembly rules) – are each
broken into their own layer of the architecture, both from
a production perspective, and more importantly, from
template authoring perspective. This approach enables the
right communications expertise to be applied by the right
person using the appropriate layer of the architecture. In
practice this means that marketers, for example, can focus
on branding and communication style, business document
Content
owners on the content and assembly rules, leaving the IT
team to work with the data and operational aspects of
SmartCOMM.

Re-usability is central to SmartCOMM design approach with

the data model, styling, channel-specific layout and shared
content components all being managed independently
during the creation of the communication templates,
allowing content, data, design and styling changes to be
made in one place in the system and then reused by all of Data
the affected components.

Figure 20 - SmartCOMM Four Layer Model

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 Processing Flow
Figure 21 depicts the core asynchronous processing flow of the document assembly process, with the document
template occupying the central area and being fed by customer-provided XML or JSON data. Fields in the XML
data-set are used to select the version-controlled template from the Content Management System (CMS). For batch
processing, the first stage also divides multiple record XML datasets into individual document transactions, allowing
for a high degree of parallel processing during the assembly stage.

When the template is presented with an individual customer XML or JSON record, it can use other metadata,
extracted from the datafeed, to determine the output format and channel. This, in turn, is used to select the
appropriate styling, layout and branding from the styleset and layout modules. Component re-usability is provided,
allowing individual document fragments – known as shared content – to be linked to a template and have their
own version control, approval and security model associated with them.

Enclosures
(Templates)

Function Library
Shared Content

</>
{;}

Template Document Output

XML/JSON data file Output
Designer Template Processor Config

</>
{;}

XML/JSON Data Model Styleset

Channel
Layout(s)

Figure 21 - SmartCOMM Resource Relationships

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 Product Components
API
SmartCOMM provides one of the broadest set of APIs in the Customer Communications Management (CCM) market,
enabling programmatic orchestration of virtually any aspect of the system. APIs are packaged as RESTful web
services or where appropriate, as client-side JavaScript- based components with their own API sets. Some APIs can
be executed against the Appliance, some against the SmartCOMM cloud service and some can be executed on both.

The richness of our APIs allows SmartCOMM’s full suite of capabilities (including communications and document
editing, generation and collaboration capabilities) to be embedded in any web-based application or native client
application. APIs have been used to integrate with applications such as Guidewire®, Salesforce, Vlocity, Pega, Adobe
Sign, and DocuSign®. API integration, development, and testing can be accelerated with the use of the Swagger API
viewer included as part of the standard SmartCOMM solution and allows the use of the API to quickly emulated.

Where SmartCOMM is embedded as an embedded component in a host solution, it is typically the host solution
which provides the user authentication. SmartCOMM has adopted the SAML 2.0 standard as a basis for providing
Single Sign-on (SSO), allowing authentication requests to be deferred to a third-party provider.

API Functional Areas

The following table describes the functional areas in more detail:

AREA DESCRIPTION

Assembly API Generates a draft or a multi-channel communication

Content Management System
Manipulates resources in the CMS
(CMS) API
Correspondence API Methods optionally used to interrogate a template ahead of generation

A control that can be embedded within a web page. The page is used to capture
Data Capture Component data that is required by the template. After the data is captured, the XML data can be
used with the Assembly API to generate a multi-channel communication.

A collection of RESTful web services that interrogate a template to determine which

Data Capture API
fields are required to generate a communication.

A collection of RESTful web services that allow generation job requests to be

Bulk API
submitted and managed.

A control that can be embedded within a web page. The control allows interactive
Draft Editor Component editing of a draft communication by the end-user. The control is typically populated
with a draft that is generated via the Assembly API.

A collection of RESTful web services that pertain to the collaboration of documents.

Collaboration API
The API methods can be used by external systems

To programmatically create Docboxes, invite users, retrieve audit information and

Docbox Component more. The UI Component comprises a Collaboration wrapper around the Draft Editor
Component.
A control which can be embedded within a web page. The control encapsulates all
User Management API the UI elements that comprise a Docbox: Draft document, attachments, audit trail
and more.

A collection of RESTful web services that can be used to administer users and groups

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 The Conversation Cloud
Our understanding of the important role that customer communications plays in the overall customer experience
strategy led to the development of our Conversation Cloud framework. The Smart Communications Conversation
Cloud framework uniquely supports enterprises in assembling customized ecosystems comprising of best-in-breed
technologies that address their specific requirements and collect a tremendous amount of customer data that can
be used to treat each customer as an individual.

Figure 22 – Smart Communications’ Conversation Cloud Framework

The framework provides the fabric and connective tissue between the Smart Communications portfolio of solutions
to partner-built and other third-party systems, the systems that our customers are relying on each day. In addition,
our professional services team offers validated accelerators expanding SmartCOMM’s functionality. All of our
offerings are built to live at the center of the Conversation Cloud - a cloud framework that connects all of your data,
applications, and history to build conversations that are relevant and impactful, time after time. This approach
increases internal efficiencies by breaking down silos and allows for a more complete and consistent view of the
customer.

Conversation Cloud Marketplace

The Conversation Cloud Marketplace™ provides
enterprises with a selection of pre-built adaptors
and integrations to common technologies
used to communicate and engage across the
entire customer lifecycle. It leverages our array
of validated plug-ins designed and built with
modern, open standards to integrate seamlessly
into customer’s existing business process
workflows. Each listing on the marketplace
provides customers with sample demo guides
and joint value descriptions of the combined
offerings.
Figure 23 – Smart Communications Conversation Cloud Marketplace

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 20

 Integrated Solutions
Owing to its rich API set and RESTful web services, SmartCOMM provides deployment-ready integrations with
key industry solutions to help your teams rapidly implement CCM and increase productivity of your business and
technical users. A selected excerpt of some of the standard integrations include:

Adobe Sign Formerly EchoSign, online signatures to SmartCOMM-generated

customer and business communications

Aly Document Analyser Optimizing quality assurance (QA) by allowing an automated

comparison of communications generated using your SmartCOMM
templates

ClaimFirst by ClaimVantage Providing an automated claims processing solution for life and health
claims for insurance carriers, third-party administrators and employers

DocuSign® Integrating online signatures to SmartCOMM-generated customer and

business communications

Guidewire InsuranceSuite™ Managing core administration operations for insurance companies

Litmus Automating testing of email communications against more than 70

individual internet browsers and email clients in real time

Pega Validated accelerators with Pega’s case management, workflow, and

tracking capabilities

Salesforce Providing enterprise-class customer communications capability all

seamlessly integrated within the Salesforce Sales, Service, Health,
Financial Service Cloud and Salesforce CPQ

Sapient Virtual Assistant Virtual chatbot assistant with user-friendly customization

TruCare® by Casenet® Providing enterprise communications capability to health care case

management solutions

Vlocity (Salesforce SmartCOMM for Vlocity delivers industry compliant, mission-critical

Industry Solutions) documents and communications across all use cases on the Vlocity and
Salesforce platform – across communications, media and entertainment,
energy, utilities, insurance, health, and government organizations.

Xceptor Provides a flexible template management and workflow system used

by many of the world’s leading banks to transform and standardize
documentation processes through automation, workflow, document
management, reporting and archive capabilities

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 21

 Conversation History
Conversation History allows enterprises to better understand the impact of their customer communications and
leverage important trends to evolve these interactions into even more meaningful conversations over time. It listens
to all appropriate outbound communications and enables detailed and granular metadata regarding them to
be stored in a customer-provided repository, allowing highly efficient and scalable mining of the data both at an
individual communication level, but also at a more holistic level across the repository and communication landscape.

Additionally, it provides a mechanism to allow third-party solutions to integrate their data about individual
communications into the repository providing a rich interaction history and allows real-time decisions to be made
about new communications to benefit from this insight. Performance insights can be used to hyper-personalize
subsequent communications or aggregated to uncover trends across the business.

Figure 24 – Smart Communications Conversation History

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 22

 Security Environment
SmartCOMM provides a granular security model which allows system administrators to specify what functions a
user can perform (based on their role) and what resources a user has access to (based on their group membership).
Administrators can apply security to CMS folders to ensure that only the appropriate users/groups have access from
within SmartCOMM. A suite of configuration functions allows system administrators to define and maintain users
and groups and their respective permissions.

Supporting the provision of Pure Cloud and hybrid cloud solutions, Smart Communications has implemented
a robust information security program. For deployment configurations in Smart Communications’ own cloud,
Smart Communications has attained PCI DSS Level 1 Certification for its Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. This
certification sits alongside other achievements, including:

• Service Organization Control Report 1 (SSAE 16, ISAE 3402) Type II

• Service Organization Control Report 2 Type II

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

• Security Rules (externally audited opinion)

• UK-based ISO 27001:2013

Minimum Requirements
The most up-to-date version of our minimum system requirements can be found at the following link:
https://www.smartcommunications.com/system-requirements/

Web Browsers
Any HTML content that is generated by SmartCOMM is supported on any modern browser. The SmartCOMM user
interfaces are supported on the following browsers:

• Microsoft® Edge (Chromium Edition)

• Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 11

• Google Chrome™ (Windows & OS X) latest version

• Mozilla Firefox® (Windows only) latest version

For the best possible experience of SmartCOMM, we recommend that you use the supported browsers listed above.

Web Browser Zoom

For the best possible experience using the SmartCOMM user interface, we recommend that you do not use the
zoom feature in your web browser. Reset the zoom level to the default 100% using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+0
(Windows) or Cmd+0 (OS X).

Screen Resolution
SmartCOMM has been optimized for screen resolutions and browser window sizes equal to or greater than
1280 x 960 pixels. The product will work on screen resolutions and browser window sizes of 1024 x 768 but the
user experience may be sub-optimal.

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 23

 SmartCOMM Appliance

The following hypervisors are supported with the SmartCOMM Appliance. The Appliance requires a version of the
selected hypervisor that supports Red Hat 7:

• VMware ESX Server

• Hyper-V

• Citrix XEN

• KVM

• Amazon Web Services

• Microsoft Azure

• Docker

Salesforce Integrations
SmartCOMM™ for Salesforce is an enterprise-grade customer communication solution designed to work with
Enterprise, Unlimited, and Performance editions of Salesforce. It is also compatible with Salesforce Communities
and is Salesforce Lightning-enabled. Standard and custom objects are supported.

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 24

 Management Information
In highly-regulated industries such as insurance and banking, customer communications are particularly critical.
Businesses should be able to monitor, control and where necessary, improve throughput and operations processes.
In response to these needs, SmartCOMM provides Management Information (MI) across the following areas:

• Job Management - for requesting communications for on-demand, interactive and for batch requests to the
Appliance.

• Draft Editor - to collect editing analytics information such as the period of time spent editing a given fragment.
The analytics data can be retrieved via an API and further processed by a business intelligence system.

• Collaboration - to capture audit trail entries and user interactions within a document to provide insight into the
negotiation process, allowing for the identification of bottlenecks, the potential to improve base templates, or
the need for user education.

Figure XXX – SmartCOMM Template Designer

Figure 25 – SmartCOMM/Kibana Reporting Interface

Smart Communications™ is the only provider of a customer conversations manage-

Connect with Us ment platform. More than 500 global brands rely on Smart Communications to deliver
smarter conversations across the entire lifecycle—empowering them to succeed in
today’s digital-focused, customer-driven world while also simplifying processes and
www.smartcommunications.com
operating more efficiently. This is what it means to scale the conversation. Smart
Communications is headquartered in the UK and serves its customers from offices
requests@smartcommunications.com located across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The Smart Communications
platform includes the enterprise-scale customer communications management power
linkedin.com/company/smart-communications. of SmartCOMM™️, forms transformation capabilities made possible by SmartIQTM
and the trade documentation expertise of SmartDX™️. To learn more, visit smart-
communications.com.

SmartCOMMTM Technical Overview 2021 | Smart CommunicationsTM 25

Copyright © SmartComms SC, Limited 2020 All rights reserved. August 2020