Choosing a Document Composition system

Organizations, in both private and public sectors, have long used Document Composition solutions to manage the production of customized documents.

Sometimes these solutions have been developed in-house, hard-wired into back-office and enterprise systems. More commonly, though, they are based on one of the legacy Document Composition products that have been in use over the last decade or more.

Print-centric, not business-focused

These products were originally developed to service the requirements of batch-printed documents, and have a heritage in high volume print composition for mainframe systems.

In both cases, the reliance on specialist product and technology expertise is a barrier between the line-of-business users and the need for the speedy and responsive design and production of business documents.

Easier for you, better for your customers

Thunderhead brings a fresh approach to the production of business documents, and delivers many significant advantages over traditional Document Composition solutions.

The innovative Thunderhead NOW platform is simple enough for business users to employ, yet powerful enough to scale to the production needs of even the largest organizations.

• Business user control – uniquely, Thunderhead NOW has been developed specifically so that business users can take control of Document Composition, free of reliance on IT expertise
• Interactive and on-demand documents – Thunderhead NOW is the leader in interactive, real-time communications and provides comprehensive functionality for high-volume batch, interactive and on-demand document applications
• Dynamic templating – this provides a write-once, publish-many model that supports deep personalization, multiple languages and jurisdictions, and any number of output channels: all from a single set of rules and a single document template, rather than relying on external tool sets, Microsoft® Word or 3rd party authoring software
• Comprehensive multi-channel output – unlike traditional Document Composition systems, Thunderhead NOW was developed from the ground up to support virtually any communication channel and device, from print, web and email through to mobile devices and XML messaging
• Open standards-based architecture – Thunderhead NOW natively supports XML without relying on proprietary data formats so it future-proofs your investments in your document inventory. Thunderhead NOW also supports XML output, with native support for industry standard XML messaging protocols such as FpML and ACORD
• Enterprise scalability – Thunderhead NOW is built on a modern Java Enterprise architecture that allows for virtually limitless scalability, even in extreme high-volume production environments
• Integrated exception management – Thunderhead NOW's BPEL-compliant integration with leading business process management (BPM) solutions enables rich exception management, far beyond the capabilities of stand-alone Document Composition solutions