Happy Birthday Microsoft Office
In a few days Microsoft Office will turn 21. It’s used in 80% of all businesses with only 8% using alternatives like Oracle StarOffice, Google Apps, and Lotus Symphony. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we thought it would be appropriate to develop some new code samples that integrate DOTS Web services with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.
MS Office offers a great development environment as well as a great set of applications (Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint). The new examples we created use the latest in .NET technologies to validate email addresses, correct postal addresses and look up sales tax rate information, all within Excel. We’ve provided the source code too, so developers can easily integrate and customize DOTS Web services into their Office applications.
Our new Excel examples enable developers to transparently leverage the power of DOTS Web services directly from within their Microsoft Office applications: after programming in the desired functionality, they can easily distribute the enhanced Office documents to their team, using 100% native Microsoft Office functionality.
So, Happy birthday, Microsoft Office, and thank you for making it possible for companies like us to design products that enhance your core functionality. DOTS Web services are now compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, versions 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010.
January 3, 2011 at 11:26 am serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
More IP Data Means Better Insight
Service Objects has significantly improved its Web services. For the last year, users of Service Objects’ IP validation and lead validation Web services have been seeing an increase in the number of International IP addresses. In the past, these IP addresses have been extremely difficult to pinpoint with a high degree of certainty; but thanks to newly available International IP data, this situation has improved.
The new IP data adds about 850,000 new IP records and has effected change for over 250,000 existing IP records. Highlights include linking IP address data to over 500 cities in India and Europe for which the mapping was previously unknown.
These new IP records will help improve the accuracy of DOTS IP Address Validation, DOTS Lead Validation, DOTS Lead Enhancement, and DOTS Lead Enhancement Plus; thereby reinforcing our customers’ efforts to accurately verify and weed-out fraudulent online transactions.
December 28, 2010 at 2:37 pm serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
CASS Certification Explained Over Dinner
Last night I was having dinner with my wife’s friends and they asked what I did for a living. Normally I just brush those requests off and say ‘Internet Security’ or ‘Contact Validation’ and change the subject. But last night I said, “Service Objects validates contacts – we validate customers names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for our clients.” I thought that was that; but the discussion lingered With questions like: How is that done? Can anyone validate addresses? Do you have an agreement with the Post Office? It was rather a lively discussion so I thought I’d rehash the highlights here.
In the United States the Postal Service promotes good address hygiene through its Coding Accuracy Support Systems (CASS) initiative. It is in the best interest of the postal service to receive mail with valid, genuine, and accurate addresses. The less incorrectly addressed mail they get, the more efficient they become and the less waste for mailers; everybody wins. The CASS certification program is open to mailers, service bureaus, and software vendors that have lots of addresses and want to get discounts on their mailings. To receive mailing discounts and be “certified”, participants in the CASS program must renew their certification annually. Every year, the requirements for being a certified address provider get more difficult. For example: In August of 2007, the USPS required CASS participants to include delivery point validation (DPV) to verify whether or not an address is deliverable at the street/house/apartment level.
CASS certification is the ultimate take-home test. The CASS certification test contains 150,000 bad addresses, extracted from real-world cases everywhere the postal service delivers, plus a few non-existent addresses thrown in for good fun. Test takers (like us) must evaluate and correct each address by fixing the ZIP code, the street address, the unit type, the bar code digits, etcetera. To be approved as a CASS certified vendor you must score above 98.5%; this means you can only miss 2,250 addresses in total. A passing grade is an A+ (geez).
Although the USPS CASS program requires a mere 98.5% passing rate, real-world accuracy for address standardization is much higher. Why? For the purpose of rigorous testing, the USPS skews the CASS test towards unrealistic conditions, intentionally populating the test with 150,000 of the worst addresses you will ever see. Given normal conditions, real-world accuracy of a CASS certified provider exceeds 99.99%. In my decade of experience with address validation, I have seen only a small handful of real address we couldn’t validate.
No sleep for the us though, the next set of 150,000 addresses for 2011 should be here at any time. I think my wife’s friends learned more about address validation than they ever wanted to know. I’m not sure I’ll get invited to dinner with them again any time soon. Well, they asked for it!
Posted by: Geoff G.
Facebook Email Addresses: A Boon for Email Validation Systems
Recently, Facebook announced a new email service that allows Facebook users to seamlessly integrate personalized Facebook e-mail accounts with their Facebook profiles. This “social inbox” concept links together SMS, IM, and e-mail into a single platform. The product provides you with an @facebook.com e-mail address that links to your profile. For instance, my Facebook account is: http://www.facebook.com/geoffrey.grow, so my Facebook email would be geoffrey.grow@facebook.com
This will be a boon for e-mail validation, in that the new Facebook messaging features will allow validators (like us) to link Facebook e-mail addresses to Facebook accounts. Pseudo-anonymous e-mail addresses (like pilot23@gmail.com) have always been a challenge to businesses; linking Facebook email addresses to profiles will aid in weeding-out unrelated contacts and fraudulent transactions. Linking together e-mail, Facebook accounts, SMS, and the contact, in other words, linking together the channels, will improve visibility into online transactions, and is a win-win for all parties (except the bad guys).
Posted by: Geoff G.
Pro-tip: Use the Service Path
The service path is basically a URL that takes you to a sort of “dashboard” for a service. You can use this dashboard to test a service, to see our XML request/response structure, to see what operations are available to you, and a slough of other useful information. Listed below are the most useful ones.
View all available operations for a Web service
We’ll use Address Validation US as an example. Let’s go to its service path: “Address Validation US“.
To run a transaction, you’ll need to use your existing Address Validation trial or production key, or get one here. Without a key, you won’t be able to run a test, but you’ll still be able to see operations and their respective inputs and outputs, etc.
(Please note: Trial and production keys are product specific. To run a test on another product, you will need to secure a key for that product. Please click here for a complete selection.)
Run a quick transaction against an operation
Once at the service path, click on an operation, place values in the textboxes, and click “Invoke”. The service will return a response in raw XML format. This is what your application sees before it parses out the data.
View all expected inputs for an operation
Click on an operation and note the input fields on the form that appears.
For example, “ValidateAddressWithDPV” expects Address, Address2, City, State, PostalCode, and LicenseKey as input fields. All of these fields must be sent to our service (even if they are sent without any data) for it to accept the request.
View all possible outputs for an operation
Scroll down past the form and look at the SOAP section. The 2nd shaded box will show you the list of XML outputs that our service returns on a successful transaction. For example, <BarcodeDigits> and <CountyName> are both possible outputs for ValidateAddressWithDPV.
Determine how to format a request for SOAP, HTTP POST, or HTTP GET
Beneath the operation input form, you will see SOAP followed by a shaded box containing the format the request should be in for a SOAP request.
Beneath that you will see HTTP GET, and finally HTTP POST. Both have a shaded box showing the expected input format for that protocol.
Keep in mind that most programming languages will handle these request schemas for you. But when troubleshooting, it’s sometimes necessary to view the request made by the application and compare to the expected request.
See what the output will look like
Go to the operation page, and either run a transaction (which will output the raw XML in a browser window), or scroll down to the protocol you will be using (SOAP, HTTP POST, or HTTP GET) and view the 2nd shaded box underneath the header. This will show you how the XML will be returned to you.
View the WSDL
Go to the main service path URL for your specific DOTS Web Service and click “Service Description”. For example, go here and click on “Service Description” (located in the first line above the operations).
The Web Services Definition Language, or WSDL (pronounced Whizz-dull) describes all these operations, inputs, operation descriptors, data types, etc. In fact, all the service path pages you see were generated from the WSDL. If you use a language that requires a WSDL URL, then it likely is generating entire objects from that document and handling all the request and response structures for you.
So there you have it! I hope you get to add this to your utility belt too. It’s an invaluable tool that I use on a daily basis.
Does Email Validation Help Catch Bogus Email Addresses?
A lot of people ask what an email validation system really does and if it really helps catch bogus email addresses.
The short answer is, it weeds out good email addresses from bad. However, all email validation systems are not created equal. Some help and others don’t.
A standard method is to use server-side scripting on Web forms to verify that emails are input correctly; it’s easy to defeat this method though by simply typing in anything@whatever.com.
With a standard email validation system, this example passes muster because it has a name, an @-sign and a TLD (Top Level Domain. Ex. .com, .org, .net): Not so with an instant, advanced email validation Web Service. If you’re in e-commerce, or any business that’s dependent upon correct email information, you’ll need more than server-side scripts to weed out bogus email addresses.
An advanced email validation Web service uses tricky algorithms to quickly identify bad information within email addresses. Think of an email validation Web service as an online x-ray device that sees through an email address’ basic structure to identify shortcomings that are not obvious by mere observation.
While standard email validation falls short in identifying bogus email addresses, advanced email validation goes the extra mile and does a pretty thorough job. An email validation Web service checks for things like: does the domain really exist? If it does, does it have rules for allowable domain names? Can it contain numbers, vulgar terms? Does the mailbox even exist within that domain? What about the SMTP server?
- Read Six Things Every Email Validation System Should Do in Service Objects’ Hot Topics, How Does Advanced Email Validation Web Services Work and How Do They Compare to Standard Email Validation Scripts?
- Check out DOTS Email Validation Web Service. Use the online demo or sign up for a free 15-day trial.
October 26, 2010 at 10:34 am serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
Why 5-Digit ZIP Codes Don’t Work
When isn’t 78368 the ZIP code for Hubert, Texas? When it’s the ZIP code for Mathis, San Patricio, Argenta or Sweeny Switch, Texas.
Lookups for 5-digit ZIP codes are often inaccurate, because, like the example above, a single ZIP code can be assigned to multiple U.S. cities. Why? Despite the geographic assignment of most ZIP codes, they generally correspond to address groups or delivery routes; sometimes more than one city can rest within a single group or route.
If you ship products within the United States, the best way to guarantee delivery is to use the latest ZIP + 4®. Since many consumers often don’t know, and therefore don’t supply this number, the only way to accurately assign a city to a ZIP code is to use an address validation system that looks at the input street address and 5-digit ZIP code simultaneously and queries the United States Postal Service’s ZIP+4® database for accurate city assignments at the street address level.
The added group of four numbers acts as an extra identifier to aid in efficient mail sorting and delivery, pinpointing not only the city, but its geographic segment within a five-digit delivery area, such as: a city block, a group of apartments, a P.O. box or an individual high-volume receiver of mail (like the IRS).
About 15% of U.S. mail, (or over 90 million pieces) is deemed undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA). Incorrectly spelled or formatted city names can mean mail returns, delays or one-way trips to mail recovery centers (MRC). Collectively, these facilities were once referred to as the “dead letter office” because once mail reaches that point, it’s destroyed.
Another multiple-city ZIP code is 62812. It has six Illinois cities assigned to it: Rend City, Benton, Barren, Eastern, Steel City and West City.
When doesn’t mail sent to 62812 end up in Rend City, Illinois? When it’s redirected to a mail recovery center; waiting alongside other “dead mail” to be destroyed.
► Lookup ZIP+4 and see how Address Validation solves the ZIP code problem.
Two Types of Online Fraud Everyone Can Do Without
DOTS Telephone Verification Steps Up Site Security
The threat from computer crimes and other online security breaches has barely slowed, never mind stopped, according to a recent survey of 538 security professionals in U.S. corporations that was conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI’s Computer Intrusion Squad.1
One such crime is online identity theft, and the two most popular ways to carry it out is though Phishing2 and Pharming3. Phishers bait you using provocative fake emails that send you to fake sites, and are successful because there is still a large part of the Internet population that is unaware of their tactics. Pharmers gather unsuspecting victims by redirecting legitimate URLs to bogus sites.
Armed with the information they harvest from consumer inputs, Phishers’ and Pharmers’ activities account for billions of dollars a year in online fraud. Companies today can play a key role in protecting their customers and themselves by fending off agents of these Phishers and Pharmers; stepping up site security and making it more difficult for them to use their ill-gotten information.
Counter online crime by integrating a live telephone verification service that communicates directly with the person interacting with your site. During a transaction, after (s)he enters his/her phone number into your Web form, the service calls or texts back with a Personalized Identification Number (PIN) that (s)he must then enter into the form before continuing on. This checks to see if the phone number is working and correct. At this point, fraudsters generally fall out. They thrive on impersonating others and doing things that can’t be traced, so, most likely, their input phone numbers will be fake and they won’t be able to complete their transactions.
Take extra measures. To guard against those that try to trick the system by using others’ phones, Service Objects’ DOTS Telephone Verification goes even further by building in optional operations you can use to identify the caller or validate the information your contact types in.
Customize your security system. You can deploy one or several operations depending on the conditions you set. For example, if you know that there is a high rate of fraud coming from a particular region, you can flag calls coming in from that region, and before delivering a PIN, without delay, check the input phone number against the listed name associated with it. You might also decide to check the contact’s geographical location or other information, such as address listing, to verify that the person placing the call is who (s)he says (s)he is.
If a phone number doesn’t match up to the person interacting with your site, set a condition and create another step in your verification process requesting further information. If the contact is truly a customer, then compliance should be no problem; but if (s)he is up to no good, this is probably where (s)he will abandon his or her mission.
CONCLUSION:
As long as the Internet exists and people continue to do business online, Phishers and Pharmers are not going away. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Internet users are duped every day. You can help protect your customers and your company by thwarting these fraudsters’ attempts to use the information they harvest from unwitting consumers.
Step up the security on your site by verifying phone numbers with a live telephone verification service that not only communicates directly with each person that interacts with your site, but also has the capacity to validate that his or her information is correct.
Verify and validate: a powerful combination that helps keep your online customers and business secure.
For more information about DOTS Telephone Verification, please visit: http://www.serviceobjects.com/products/phone/telephone-verification
1 Excerpt from Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/62002/Security_Statistics_
2 Phishing is a method of “baiting” users to give up personal information by sending out legitimate looking emails that contain links that go to fake sites designed to look equally as legitimate as the emails. Phishers are impersonators claiming to be legitimate companies (banks, popular shopping sites, etc.) in order to scam users into giving up private account information. Phishing, in a way, is similar to fishing with a net. Phishers throw their “nets” out, bait users to enter, and eventually drag in an adequate percentage of victims.
3 Pharming is more insidious in that it doesn’t just rely on bait to gather and harvest users’ personal information; even the most Internet savvy user may unwittingly become a victim. Pharmers operate by re-directing Internet users to bogus Web sites— even if they type into their browsers the exact address of their banks or other online services. So basically, someone believing that (s)he is interacting with his/her bank is actually providing the pharmer with his/her bank information, social security number and/or other private information that can be used to perpetrate a bevy of offline as well as online criminal activities.
Plug Into Web Services without Breaking a Sweat
Introducing the Address Validation
Do-it-Yourself Plugin for Salesforce.com
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
When I can get greater functionality out of my work applications without getting the tech staff involved, it makes my day. Sometimes I just need a no-muss-no-fuss solution that doesn’t require me to fill out a time and expense requisition for help. There are also times I need things done quicker than professional business manners allows for. I wouldn’t want my co-workers to confuse my enthusiasm with pushiness, after all.
I think Service Objects’ development team had people like me in mind when they came up with this new plugin for Salesforce.com. It’s so easy to install that everyone with basic computer skills can do it, and immediately start validating contact addresses, in real time, from within their Salesforce.com applications— regardless of technical background and without breaking a sweat.
Prior to the development of this plugin, implementing Address validation services required programmers with advanced programming skills, familiarity with various technologies like XML, SOAP, and web services and an understanding of Salesforce.com’s development platform as well as their proprietary programming language.
Today, no programming time or expertise is required. If you’re working in Salesforce.com and want to start validating your contact addresses immediately, then you’ve got to try out this Address Validation plugin.
To use our web services, you’ll need to sign up for a free evaluation Trial Key or purchase a Production Key for DOTS Address Validation. Use your own data with our Address validation services to compare and correct your data entries with USPS and Canada Post database information.
Download our easy 12 step installation guide and see for yourself how easy it is to install.
Reverse Phone Lookup: Token-Based Pricing Helps You Keep Your “Pot of Gold”
What do St. Patrick’s Day and a reverse phone lookup service have in common?
If the reverse phone lookup service is GeoPhone Plus from Service Objects, the answer is: a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 
An advanced reverse phone lookup service, like GeoPhone Plus, gives you the ability to identify detailed contact information for landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free numbers for both residences and businesses – all from a supplied phone number.
This is a great solution but where GeoPhone also excels is its pricing model.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
For example:
A major grocery retailer is using GeoPhone Plus to perform reverse phone lookup on phone numbers provided by their customers. They use the detailed contact data (name, address, etc) to have a better idea of where their customers are coming from to help make decisions about targeted marketing efforts and potential locations for future stores. Each time their software service requests information on a specific phone number, GeoPhone Plus hits multiple data sources to find detailed contact information for that phone number. GeoPhone Plus returns contact information on all types of phone numbers such as landlines, VOIP, wireless and toll-free. The type and level of contact data available varies depending on the type of phone number.
In standard pricing models, you would pay the same “per transaction” fee for each reverse phone lookup attempt, regardless of whether or not detailed contact data exists for that phone number. But all phone numbers and the data available are not created equally. With “token-based” pricing, you pay only when a successful match is made for the phone number. The amount of tokens charged per transaction depends on the level of detail and the quality of contact data available for that phone number.
Contact us for more information on GeoPhone Plus and token-based pricing.
