Last week I introduced you to the on-line donation page at themillenniumfoundation.org.au. One of the key features of this page is the validation of data as it is entered.

So many websites I see have poor validation of customer details. Of course if the details are entered lazily or incorrectly by the customer, they are going to be wrong. This means returned mail, low postal barcoding rates and more importantly, the possibility of losing the customer that you thought you just gained.

DMS has done a lot of research in this area over the last couple of years. One of the key things that we have done is building in our POSTman application support to our client’s sites.

For those of you not familiar with it, POSTman is an AMAS certified application that incorporates a database from Australia Post of all deliverable addresses in Australia. It can be used to validate address data and detects when customers have made a misspelling or got the postcode/suburb incorrect, or even just entered a completely bogus address!

POSTman automatically corrects minor errors or assist the client by taking them to a list of “near matches”. Websites are notorious for the poor quality of data that they produce and POSTman has been a great solution for many of our clients including the likes of Vodafone.

But here’s the exciting part; we are now introducing an even easier way to add this capability to your website. DMS are now offering the POSTman application as an online web service that you can subscribe to for as little as $49.95 per month. We’ll even give you example source code to show you how to build this address validation into your website.

Offering POSTman address validation via a web service means that customers can get up and running very quickly with no need to install any software, no need to apply the quarterly updates from Australia Post and no need to worry about security issues or where to publish the POSTman web application.

If you would like to know more about the POSTman Web Service, please give Andrew a call on (07) 3510 9555 or e-mail him at a.douglas@dmsw.com.au

More great news for MAILman customers this week; over the last few weeks I’ve been talking about the new Content Management and website integration capabilities in the upcoming release of MAILman. This week we’ll be going live with the first site that incorporates live transaction processing.

Go visit the Millennium Foundation’s website; they raise funds for research at the Westmead Hospital in Sydney.

We’ve developed for them an on-line donation page in our secure environment here at DMS that is directly linked to their pre-existing website and their MAILman database. That means strong validation of your customers’ and donors’ details, duplicate detection, automatic updating of accounts and best of all no file transfers. On-line contributions are saved straight in their MAILman database.

Over the next few weeks, we have a number of other sites that will be going live as well with the same technology. Currently we can do event registrations, donations, pledges and the updating of donor details. In the next month or two we’ll be delivering the same ability for merchandise sales and lottery ticket sales. We can even do custom transaction types so if you have some really unusual requirements, let us know.

This is just one more step to tie MAILman to customer websites. The big focus is on eliminating the gap between what is done on your website and what is done on your in-house CRM or fundraising system. The days of heavy compromises and totally separate systems are over.

If you want to know more about what we have done with MAILman and web integration, download this white paper now.

Last week I explained that the new DMS website is now being driven by our MAILman CRM application. This week I’m going to explain a little more. In particular what we have done in respect to content management. For most organisations’ web-sites are developed by external developers and the process of producing, authenticating and then publishing content is a difficult one. There is so much going backwards and forwards between your copywriters and graphic artists, the website developers and the website hosts.

To build relationships with your clients, communications via your website is a vital tool. To enable this, DMS have developed a complete content management system and built it right into the MAILman application. Much of the content on the dmsw.com.au site and all of the content on the MikeFrench.info site is now produced and published entirely within the MAILman CRM application.

The few lucky clients who have been privy to this so far tell us that they have been really impressed with how easy it is to produce content and publish it through MAILman. You may have already seen on the 28th of January posting an example of the range of multimedia content we are capable of publishing as well.

I’m going to post here a few more articles that show some of the other types of content that we can publish as well. Things like Google Maps, photographs and more are all managed through the one easy to use interface. With proper quality control and security mechanisms, you can even control when content is to be published automatically, so that you can have pages pre-set to appear and be revoked at set times making your website truly dynamic.

There are two reasons why this is important. One, of course, is simply to make the process of communicating with your clients fast and efficient but the second is because Google and other web search engines like to see new content appearing all the time. If they see that your site is dynamic, they will crawl it more frequently and lift your ranking in your prospects search results.

Have a look now at some of the example postings I’m putting up on this blog to see the sorts of content possible through the MAILman website integration.

After months of development, the new DMS website is on-line. A huge amount of time has been invested in this, but there’s more to it than you may think.

Web capabilities feature heavily in DMS’s product plan for 2008, in particular, a series of new web-services for our data products customers and web integration for our MAILman customers. Before I tell you too much about that though, let’s look at some of the things that we’ve done with the new website;

To start with, we needed to find a way to communicate our complex product line simply to our clients and prospects. When you are a small company that has nearly twenty different products and services that it sells to dozens of different industries, it is hard to communicate that to the outside world in a simple, clear and consistent manner.

I think our design team have done a fantastic job in doing this with our new site. Have a look at how we have simplified the menu structure and used the products and industries pages to make it easy both for existing clients looking for information about their products or other specific products that they know about, and for new prospects coming to our site who want to know who we are and what we do and more importantly what products we have that might be of relevance to them.

Another big change on the new site is our new support area. This area requires registration but allows both prospects evaluating products and our existing clients to quickly access product updates, evaluation products and a range of other resources that we make available.

Perhaps the biggest shift though is the fact that the new web-site is completely driven by our own MAILman CRM software. MAILman now has the ability to integrate directly with websites to assist in such processes as client logins, security, access rights and much more.

This is just a small taste of what we’ll be rolling out over the next few months though, so stay tuned for much, much more.