10.4. Future of Hybrid Mail

IDP and Sun have only scratched the surface of this nascent market—a world of opportunity awaits. According to the “Hybrid Mail in the Third Millennium” report,^[1] the potential of hybrid mail messaging (in computer mail processing markets) will increase more than 460 percent between 1998 and 2005. And thanks to an aggressive first-mover advantage, IDP stands to become the de facto standard hybrid message management system provider. Moreover, it is not just the technology that gives the company its edge; rather, it is also the fact that IDP was heavily involved in the development of HML (Hybrid Mail Language), which was approved by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) in January 2001. IDP serves as a technical advisor to the committee.

^[1] Source: Mackintel Ltd., "normal" published report.

HML is a superset of Extensible Markup Language (XML), the standard protocol for describing Web documents. J2EE technology defines a set of descriptors in XML, making it easy to implement customizable components and to develop custom tools. HML allows applications to exchange mail or messages according to a standard, the “electronic envelope.” In this way, any document format can be exchanged between systems.

Prior to being sent, an electronic letter is wrapped in an HML formatted file so that it can be sent over the Internet and read by the receiving Web server. However, not all XML—or in this case, HML—documents are created equal. XML uses HTML-style tags not only to format documents but to identify the kinds of information in documents so that it can be reformatted for use in other documents, as well as used in information processing. For example, lawyers have a very different way of describing a particular event than, say, a marketing professional. HML is already being adopted by major postal operators as the industry's standard document type definition (DTD).

“IDP has been a major driver in defining hybrid-mail language,” says Olsen. “We have helped introduce HML as the interface language between Java technology–based transactions, developed by Sun Professional Services, and the back-office system that we developed.” Messages are collected in WEB ePOST and transferred from the customer to the application server using HML. These messages are then routed by an appropriate EJB component through the JDBC layer to the back-end systems. Explains Johnsen, “HML gives us the flexibility to draw from, create, and exchange documents in multiple formats. That means our customers can count on WEB ePOST to support most business or personal communications.”