May 29, 2009

Intelligent Mail^® Services Weekly Update

PostalOne! Release 22 – We will deploy PostalOne! release 22 in November to support the Intelligent Mail Full-Service pricing incentives. Release 22 also provides improved solutions for copalletization and will allow mailers to provide electronic documentation and retrieve Mailer IDs, Customer Registration IDs, and Full-Service feedback using Mail.XML.

On RIBBS we updated the Postal Service Mail.dat Technical Specification, the Postal Service Mail.XML Technical Specification and the Guide to Intelligent Mail for Letters and Flats to reflect the November changes. Please provide feedback by June 5 via e-mail to imb@usps.gov. We will evaluate your feedback and revise the specifications for reposting on June 12. The revised Postal Service Mail.XML Technical Specification includes drafts of the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) files and error codes for the new Mail.XML messages supported in the November release. Customers can provide feedback on the WSDL and error codes within the Mail.XML specifications until June 19. A final version of the Mail.XML specification will be published on June 26.

Full Service Test Environment for Mailers (TEM) – Mailers must complete the test process before submitting Full Service mailings. We published an updated version of our Checklist on RIBBS to help mailers prepare electronic documentation and migrate to the Full-Service option. The checklist provides step-by-step tasks and accompanying worksheets for data set-up requests. Steps include using the Guides to construct Intelligent Mail barcodes and electronic documentation, making plans for feedback, establishing access to the Business Customer Gateway, designing and validating barcodes, and testing electronic documentation. The updated checklist includes test scenarios for mailers to complete in the TEM.

PostalOne! Production Issues – Wednesday, May 27th and Thursday May 28th, customers experienced delayed processing of 08-1 and 08-2 Mail.dat jobs submitted to the legacy environment and had to resubmit jobs after a restart of the PostalOne! upload server. This issue was related to database performance against large tables that are partitioned by month and grow very large toward the end of a month. A database parameter will be adjusted this Sunday, May 31st to optimize database performance. In addition, a daily maintenance job is scheduled to analyze and optimize database access of these larges tables as a preventive measure for end of month volumes in future months. This database maintenance job was completed approximately 12:30 PM CDT to resolve today's Mail.dat backlog.

 A second issue was reported last week and has been identified as a problem with PostalOne! Release 20 deployed on May 11th. This issue only impacted mailers who are using the legacy Mail.dat 08-1/08-2 "batch processor" capability. When submitting files through the batch processor, a small percentage (1to 2 percent) of the jobs failed user authentication, resulting in the job not being uploaded. No error message was returned to the batch processor when this occurred and mailers were required to use metrics search to confirm and identify jobs that needed to be resubmitted. An application fix has been deployed to correct this problem and tested in the CAT environment. This fix will become active once PostalOne! is restarted during the system maintenance window this Sunday. 

Software Upgrades for Full-Service Option – We will deploy a software upgrade for Full-Service on June 7, in PostalOne! Release 20.0.1. We explain the functions supported in this upgrade in PostalOne! Release Notes on RIBBS, under “Intelligent Mail Services,” then “Guides.”

Assistance – Please call the PostalOne! Help Desk at 1-800-522-9085 if you have any questions or problems accessing the Business Customer Gateway or your accounts, or submitting electronic documentation.