IPS, Inc. develops Political Do Not Call service for Political Universe.  (From concept to fruition.)

IPS, Inc. has developed a new internet-based service called Political Do Not Call for Political Universe, LLP. This service is designed to help reduce or eliminate unsolicited telephone calls from political candidates, parties, and organizations.

June 14, 2004
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The Concept (Power to the People)

Political Do Not Call decided to put the power in the people's hands.  The idea was simple: allow users to add their telephone numbers to the Political Do Not Call service and Political Do Not Call would contact the campaigns in the subscribers area to alert the campaigns that the subscriber would not like to be contacted by the phone number the subscriber provided.  And, if the subscriber was contacted by phone by one of the campaigns, the subscriber could logon to Political Do Not Call and post a complaint.  The complaint would then be sent to the campaign and publicly posted to the web to help deter future campaign calls.

As simple as the idea seemed, the complex technology behind the service had to be enterprise quality to handle the possible excessive web requests, integrated complicated logic and massive data storage needed to provide the Political Do Not Call service.

Interface Design (Brand New Brand)

Step one of the project was to put a "pretty face" on the service so people would feel comfortable with the service, find it easy to use and promote the appearance of a site which contained subject matter which was political, addressed phone solicitations, and was patriotic.  The color scheme of red, white and blue was immediately chosen because of its mass patriotic and political appeal by the public.  Next, a hand holding a telephone was put in front of a flag, providing instant identification with telephones and patriotism.  The banner background stars provided additional emphasis to the "stars and stripes" theme.  Additional pointers and background graphics were added to be consistent with the brand development.

A simple three column design which was scalable to 100% and usable by users with 800x600 screen resolution was developed using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets.  All logic was passed to and from the browser using Java Server Pages (JSP) technology.

Enterprise Environment (Sun ONE and MySQL)

Political Do Not Call required a application/data environment that would, at the minimum, account for the abundant amount of data that was required to validate a user and provide the user with the appropriate campaign information.  Additionally, the environment needed to be scalable, redundant and most of all, secure.  IPS developed the Political Do Not Call enterprise environment at the IPS Data Center to include a robust application environment which included several Sun Microsystems application and data servers running Solaris 9 and the Sun ONE platform.   MySQL was chosen to provide scalable, transaction-based data storage because of it's robust nature and reasonable total cost of ownership.

Complex Logic (Validation Deployment)

Allowing a user to sign up for the service was one thing, but validating that the user is who he or she says he is, is another.   This meant that ensuring the Political Do Not Call data was valid was vital to Political Do Not Call's success.  IPS developed a new methodology that enabled the Political Do Not Call service to track the person's name and aliases to find out if there was a person who lived at the address they had specified that matched their name and if they had a telephone number that was valid.  Once the user was validated they were able to subscribe their phone numbers to the Political Do Not Call service.  Once the user subscribed their number(s), they could then log on and automatically see a list of campaigns that were in their area.   This saved the users time of drilling down through all of the thousands of campaigns that are available, nation-wide.

Subscription Transactions (PayPal Integration)

Each subscribed phone number incurred a small fee to help fund data storage, ongoing complaint reporting, and the general work it would require to run the Political Do Not Call service.   Several transaction processes were provided to Political Do Not Call and Political Do Not Call chose the Ebay service PayPal to handle the online transactions.  Once PayPal was chosen, IPS integrated the PayPal payment gateway into the Political Do Not Call framework and provided Political Do Not Call administrators the ability to reconcile the transactions against their subscriber list.   The user was provided with a seamless process that carried the user through PayPal and back to the Political Do Not Call web service with no interruption of the Political Do Not Call experience.

Community Collaboration

Providing a community environment where subscribers could collaborate would be an integral piece of Political Do Not Call.   Once a user was subscribed, they could then interact with other users by posting a complaint against a campaign or posting to a newsgroup, which provided an archived threaded discussion area.

Security and Privacy

Since users would be providing their personal information and since Political Do Not Call wanted to adhere to the highest privacy standards, the Political Do Not Call service encrypted all data that was sent to and from the users.  Additionally, at the IPS Data Center, a network architecture was put in place that alienated the users data to a secure internal network, which meant that the Political Do Not Call data could not be accessed from outside their internal network, except through the Political Do Not Call service.

Fruition

The Political Do Not Call service is an ideal example of a do not call service, providing its users with an easy way to join and add phone numbers to its service, as well as continually collaborate and report call infractions.  All of this functionality under the umbrella of an infrastructure that can grow with the Political Do Not Call subscriber base, well into the future.

About Innovative Productivity Solutions, Inc.

Innovative Productivity Solutions, Inc. (IPS) provides strategic enterprise software solutions for companies and organizations that increase productivity and profitability.

Contact Innovative Productive Solutions, Inc. at 2376 Bulverde Rd, Suite 112, Bulverde, TX, 78163-4593, US; Tel: (210) 587-7985. To learn more about IPS visit the company’s Website at http://www.ips-inc.net/ .

For Additional Information:
Butch Carruth
Tel: (210) 587-7985

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