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#§ Business-Information-Dispatcher - README
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#§ (C) 2007 - BID - Project - Group
#§ ------------------------------------------------------
#§ EMail: aotto1968 at users.sourceforge.net
#§ ------------------------------------------------------
#§ this software has GPL permissions to copy
#§ please contact AUTHORS for additional information
#§
Business Information Dispatcher (BID) overview
==============================================
The BID software was designed to apply business-rules to your eMail
traffic. A business-rule can be as easy as rewriting a header, to
route the eMail to an other recipient, up to setup a persistent work-
flow to realize a business-case. The BID software support all aspects
of business-automation like:
* receiving eMails from your already available Mail-Transport-Agent
* analyzing eMails to extract business-information
* joining and creation of new business-information
* creating of customized layouts to represent your corporate-identity
Emails are common used to transport business relevant information from
a sender to a receiver. Sources of business information are business-
applications, monitoring-applications or just the normal user asking
for or providing data. The goal of the BID tool was to automate the dis-
patching of this information and to join a business-case with a respon-
sible receiver. A receiver can be a human being or just an other BID
server customized for a special business-case. The BID server was de-
signed as generic server using a plugin to serve a specific business-rule.
The main features of the BID server are:
* link into the local Mail-Transport-Agent (UNIX)
* work as a single stand-alone application or as a peer-to-peer network
cluster available on every host in your domain
* receive emails for local or alias accounts
* rewrite email headers and join a business case with a responsible receiver
* parse email bodies to do further processing
* including a local database to setup a perform a persistent workflow
* including a service to create HTML emails based on your corporate
identity using a template
* including a service to manage access from your secure internal network
to the Internet
* including a service to detect email spam and reduce network load
* including a service to access to your local email2sms gateway
* including a service to setup and maintain an email2sms mobile phone book
* including a service to monitor your local MTA, BID server and host
* including a quality framework to test and verify your business-rules
files available
===============
To use the BID tool the shell script wrapper "bid.bash" is available.
bid.bash have to be linked into your local email transport agent using
the /etc/aliases, /etc/mail/aliases or $HOME/.forward file.
The following sub-directories are available:
* db ............ file based database
* doxygen-doc ... documentation
* lib ........... collection of support libraries
* logs .......... log-files written by bid.bash
* plugins ....... business-rule storage as tcl scripts
* template ...... HTML email templates
* tests ......... additional test scripts
the next steps
==============
read the documentation:
> firefox doxygen-doc/html/index.html
run the test cases:
> make check
