- Overview
Transaction Manager Overview
Transaction Manager manages, monitors, secures, and controls Avoka Transact’s data collection applications or electronic forms. It ensures that each data collection application is optimized for each intended device. It also maintains the security, scalability, reliability, and consistency, and quality of delivery of each data collection application it outputs. Transaction Manger is a powerful tool that also:
- Acts as an intelligent hub, managing all aspects of the customer transaction with support for various methods of data capture, types of attachments, digital signatures, and payment gateways.
- Provides advanced integration capabilities so that your existing systems can be used as both data sources for pre-population and destinations for submission delivery data.
- Synchronizes forms and data to mobile devices to enable mobile field workers (inspectors, auditors, sales & field service staff) to collect data on offline / disconnected devices.
In summary, Transaction Manager ensures the delivery of data collection applications that provide a better, simpler, faster, and more secure user experience than paper forms, web forms, or custom applications.
- Features & Demos
Following is a summary of some of the main features of the Transaction Manager
Simple – Configurable User Interaction Patterns
A data capture application exists as part of a larger interaction between your customer, your organization, and your back-end systems. Transaction Manager orchestrates and manages the interactions between the user and your organization’s business process.
Aware – Analytics and Metrics for Monitoring and Managing
The user experience is everything. Transaction Manager captures the information about your forms’ usage so you can monitor performance, make design improvements to the application when necessary, and plan for the future.
Complete – Form Application Management and Deployment
You need to control and manage your data capture applications. Our sophisticated content repository controls both the publication and management of multiple versions of your applications and it provides customer status tracking information.
In Step – Enterprise-Level Integration
Transaction Manager makes it easy to pull data out of your business systems for pre-population and look-ups. It also makes it easy to push collected information into your back-end systems to enable straight-through processing.
Proven – Enterprise Class Security, Hardening, and QoS
Avoka Transact is a mature, proven, secure, reliable, and scalable solution that is deployed in many large organizations. The solution dynamically scales to ensure that users are given a consistent quality of service (QoS) level in times of peak load. It also provides the comprehensive user and data security needed by large enterprises.
Transaction Manager – Overview
Transaction Manager enables business users to deploy and manage SmartForms in a timely and cost-effective manner. Watch this introductory video to get an overview of Transaction Manager.
Web Plug-in Integration with CQ5
This video demonstrates how SmartForms can be easily integrated with any web content management system – here the example is Adobe CQ5, using the Web Plug-in.
- How it works
How it Works
Deploying and managing SmartForm apps requires the same level of process, rigor, and control that would be used to manage any business application. Consideration needs to be give to testing, security, performance management, integration with back-end systems and many other factors. Unlike conventional business applications organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of data collection applications – and therefore its critical to have an agile yet rigorous management tool to control this process. Avoka Transact enables IT to manage and control the environment, while enabling business users to create and manage their own SmartForm apps.
Business Agility: Transaction Manager enables business users and operations staff to publish and manage electronic forms and seamlessly couple these to your business processes.
- Authorized users can deploy data collection apps with a ‘click’ and make them immediately accessible
- Schedule the automated release of data collection apps for a future date and time
- Specify an expiration date to limit the offline usage to a specified time period
- Ensure that only tested and approved data collection apps are deployed into production
- Develop and test on a pre-production server, and then export SmartForm apps to a production server
- A wide variety of tools and reports to ensure the smooth operation of your data collection apps
IT Control: Transaction Manager enables IT to control and manage the entire environment.
- Configurable roles and permissions enable precise audited control over the management of the system
- Provides a fine-grained roles and permissions security model
- Supports both local user accounts and LDAP-based user accounts such as ActiveDirectory
- Automatically audits system configuration changes
Submissions and Delivery Services
Transaction Manager is a powerful customer-interaction and system-integration hub between form transactions and back-end business processes. Some of the capabilities of Transaction Manager include:
- Detecting the device making the service request and delivers an optimized SmartForm app for desktop computers, iPhone, iPad,Windows, and Android mobile devices.
- Enabling organizations to securely submit information directly to back-end systems. Submitted information is stored in a secure submission repository to provide operations information, status tracking, virus scanning of attached documents and other services to users. Submission data hashing, transaction auditing and digital signatures provide you with non-repudiation.
- Enabling submissions to direct the next step in the transaction workflow, such as attachments, payments or signatures, or support saving drafts online.
Transaction Manager allows users to configure SmartForm apps into a deployment workflow that supports your specific business process. Some of those configuration options include:
- Form Landing Pages: Configure landing pages to describe the form’s requirements and ensure forms are catalogued by search engines and are discoverable by users (ISO 15836)
- Pre-Population: Enable form pre-population
- Attachments: Support associated file attachments that must be provided with a submission
- Online Payments: Add an online credit card payment capability – using the second-party integration model specify what payments are required and guide users through the online payment process
- Save Draft: Configure a save capability so users can gather additional information and complete the submission later
- Receipts: Provide customers with read-only PDF receipts (receipt number, date, and time) of their submissions to better enable user and support staff to track submissions
- Wet Ink Signatures: Many forms require a real “wet ink” signature. Avoka Transact provides a 2D barcode solution and a “signature block” solution
- Digital Signatures: If your organization has deployed electronic digital certificates to customers or employees, these can be used to electronically sign Adobe PDF forms so they cannot be altered
- eSignatures: In addition to wet ink and digital signatures Avoka Transact offers a “click-through” eSignature capability that works with all types of forms and does not require the user to have a digital certificate installed on their computer
High-Level Workflow
The following diagram is a high-level workflow showing how customers typically interact with Avoka Transact.
- User locates appropriate SmartForm using one of several search or SmartForm finding tools available in the portal.
- Optional form is pre-populated – several options can be used including using user profile data or custom look-ups. Normally no programming is required to configure pre-population.
- Form is “rendered” to user. Depending on their device and browser, different renditions of the form are automatically utilized.
- User submits the completed form back to Transaction Manager. The XML data is stored temporarily along with any additional information while the submission processing is completed. Options during the submission process provided by Transaction Manager include:
- Payment processing. Credit card payment functionality can be processed during the submission. Integration with several payment services is available.
- Attachment handling. Optional documents can be attached as part of the submission process. These are automatically virus scanned as part of the submission payload.
- Click-through signatures. This enables users to view and then accept a certified read-only version of their submitted form during the submission processes. A server-based digital certificate can then be applied to sign the submitted document.
- Once the submission is accepted the user is guided to a “thank you” or “confirmation” page where they can view and download a read-only receipt (PDF/A) of their submission.
- Transaction Manager delivers the submission payload to the back-end business process. This can be as simple as initiating a BPM / workflow (business process) but can also extend to using web services to push the data to legacy systems in another location. Transaction Manager acts a a hub – enabling every SmartForm to be associated with different back-end processes. Delivery can also occur to the Avoka Transact Integration Agent which can be installed inside an organization’s network and can synchronize data in a secure fashion.
- No matter what the back-end workflow is there are normally key “milestone” steps in the process where the applicant can monitor progress.
- Transaction Manager provides APIs to enable back-end business processes to report on the progress. Users can track this via the self-service portal.
