January 5, 2006 -- Exstream Software, Inc. today announced positive reports from Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company, a market leader in providing voluntary insurance to employees and their families. Exstream’s Dialogue enterprise personalization software replaced Colonial’s legacy technologies for document creation (several of which were no longer supported by the product’s vendor), providing a single comprehensive infrastructure for creating, personalizing and delivering its printed and web-based communications. Dialogue’s content and system integration capabilities made it possible for the company to aggressively complete the entire conversion process in twelve months. With the initial technology conversion complete, Colonial expects to see significant reductions in data-driven document deployment costs using Dialogue. Key drivers in the company’s selection of Dialogue included its robust design environment; high-performance engine; ability to automate the retrieval and dynamic placement of variable images in policyholders’ documents at run time—including graphics, electronic signatures and document images; and its unique ability to process policies, reports and letters converted from Metacode legacy forms. With Dialogue, Colonial was able to process Metacode image documents along with original data from legacy systems with minimal modification. "Converting 130,000 Metacode forms with 100% fidelity from another system for which we had no editable text source was a colossal task," said Les Blackwell, systems analyst for Colonial. - more - "Exstream was the only vendor that stepped up to the plate and came onsite to prove its product was capable of handling the conversion. The proof of concept they conducted convinced us that Dialogue was the only product with the power and speed to meet our conversion needs, while providing the feature set we needed to create rules-based, complex data-driven documents in the future." Going forward, Colonial plans to take advantage of Dialogue’s intuitive design environment and easy-to-create business rules to give the company’s business users more control over creation, personalization and maintenance of content, lessening dependency on IT resources. Additionally, the company reports Dialogue’s ability to generate documents in real time will be employed to create documents interactively for online review and approval, significantly speeding the document creation and customization process. "We are very pleased that Dialogue executed Colonial’s conversion from its legacy technologies with great ease and speed," said Michael Charest, vice president of Exstream’s insurance practice. "Colonial is a leading edge insurance provider and its focus on the customer through implementing innovative technology is sure to even further increase its competitiveness in the industry."