The software used by enterprise businesses for creating variable-data customer documents must be highly reliable, and vendors are increasingly distributing such software via the cloud as an online service. This means that vendors now assume responsibility for the IT resources hosting and supporting the software as well as the customer documents and data. Vendors also assume responsibility for pushing updates to all customers simultaneously. To support the test and release of new versions, software vendors must deploy and configure the software at an unprecedented rate.

Enterprise businesses rely on variable data publishing solutions to produce customer communications, such as letters, statements, and financial reports, which are tailored to individual recipients. Until now, however, such customer communications systems were out of the reach of the small and medium business (SMB) market for several reasons. In order to produce enterprise-quality documents, businesses needed employees with advanced skills in document design and automated document composition. In addition, customized documents typically require scripted business logic and complicated data integration. To achieve this level of document composition and delivery would require the SMB user to have access to IT systems and staffing that would be prohibitively expensive. HP Relate is an innovative document design system that delivers enterprise-quality documents for a next-generation customer communication system for the SMB market. HP Relate features easy-to-use document design tools that require no more than self-assisted training. Document business logic and data integration is accessible to SMB users through common office tools, such as dragging and dropping and spreadsheets. Instead of requiring software installed on the user's system, HP Relate is provisioned on a cloud-based platform using a software as a service (SaaS) subscription-based model. In addition, the HP Relate platform enables SMBs to deliver documents in the format of a customer's choosing, including traditional print forms, web-based deployment, and mobile devices.

The need for secure data exchange within the public Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) environment is addressed by applying the IEEE 802.10 Secure Data Exchange (SDE) protocol. A result of this study has been the implementation of an efficient protection mechanism for information transfer over the public SMDS network, providing security against unauthorized disclosure, data modification, masquerading attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. A security and key management system, consisting of applications and protocols, has also been provided. This has been used for configuring security system attributes such as cryptographic keys, session keys, and security flags, and for the supervision of the SDE protocol and the maintenance of local secure management information bases.>