(With 
Digital Encryption Protection)
The AlertMail Module will integrate with virtually any casino software application
including Operational, Accounting, Finance, Human Resourses, & Payroll Systems.
This Module will support your Executive Team by allowing them to more effectively
manage their departments and will increase productivity by providing secure online
access to their data via e-mail distribution. Once this information is received,
they will be able to drill-down to more detailed information as well as obtain
graphed data.
- Each user receives their alerts as a rich-text
message with an HTML attachment.
- The email message consists of a summary of each
alert, the source application, and the number of rows returned for each alert.
- If the recipient has a personal Digital Certificate,
this can be used to encrypt the email at the server before it is sent, thus
making the email unreadable except by the intended recipient.
- The attached HTML is a disconnected file containing
all the data returned by each alert.
- The data is formatted into HTML tables, and scripted
for browsing and ease of use.
- Additional scripting is provided which enables
each Alert to be graphed.
- This consists of instantiating the Web Graph component
provided by Microsoft Office.
The disconnected nature of the email alert makes it
possible to view these alerts outside the network from which the data originated.
When recipients are in the same network, and
have sufficient credentials, the AlertMail Report allows the user to drill
down right into the Web Reporting system and interact with the live data.
Security
The alerts system support three levels of security: no encryption, use encryption
where available, and require encryption. Encryption consists of using
Email Digital Ids, or Certificates, to encrypt an email in such a way that only
the intended recipient is able to un-encrypt. This is accomplished through
the use of a public/private key system supported by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange
(see www.verisign.com to
obtain a Digital ID). To encrypt emails, a unique Digital ID must
be purchased for each recipient, the recipient’s public key must be available
to the AlertMail Engine, and no ID is necessary for the AlertMail Engine.
-
No Encryption. Selecting
this option has the system ignore the encryption functionality altogether.
-
Use Encryption. If the Digital
Certificate exists in the certificate file store (see figure 3.1), the alerts
engine will utilize that certificate to encrypt the emails. If the
certificate is unavailable, then the email will be sent un-encrypted.
-
Require Encryption.
If the Engine finds a certificate, the email will be encrypted and transmitted.
If no certificate is available for that user, then the email is not transmitted,
and an error is logged.
Architecture
The ALertMail system is optimized for flexibility. Therefore
the AlertMail Engine stores its configuration information in a MS SQL Server database,
but is capable of reporting on any ODBC-compliant data source. This is done
by allowing the user to configure almost every aspect of the alerts system, and
connect it to almost any data source. More on the configuration features
below.
Web Server
The AlertMail is designed to run on the same Microsoft IIS Web server as the Web
Reporting system. The server handles two distinct functions. The first function
is to process the configuration web site for administrators to configure and test
the Alerts system.
The second function is to actually run the AlertMail E-Mail Engine, retrieve data
from the application data sources, and send the emails. The AlertMail Engine
is an NT Service that runs on the web server (or another server). This service
waits until an Alert Interval has passed, at which point it reads the configuration
from the Alerts Database, and runs Alert queries against each of the application
data sources.
The resulting queries are then assembled into an e-mail
format and transmitted over SMTP to each email address. The AlertMail
Engine makes use of CDO & CAPICOM (Microsoft email components) to digitally
sign & encrypt the email before transmittal.
Alerts Engine Database
All configuration settings, options, Users and Alerts information
are stored in the AlertMail Database. Thus the AlertMail database
is the brains, and contains all the instructions needed by the AlertMail Engine
Service in order to connect to each application, retrieve data, compile reports
and send them to the users. This database can run on its own SQL Server,
or on a server running other application databases.
