November 15, 2007 - Exstream Software, leading software provider for enterprise document automation solutions, today announced the winners of its 2007 Visionary Awards presented at the sixth annual North American User Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, October 14-17. The awards recognize customers who achieved outstanding results using Exstream's Dialogue software to achieve business requirements such as improved customer experience through more effective communications and reduced costs by streamlining document processes. At this year's conference, themed "Creating Customer Impact: The Interactive Evolution," Exstream hosted close to 300 customers from a variety of industries. For the coveted Visionary Award, customers submitted Dialogue document applications for Best Designed Document, Best Application Architecture, Most Significant Return on Investment, and Most Sophisticated Application. For the first time, this year an honorable mention was given in the category of Transpromo.
Diversified Investment Advisors and CitiCards both earned the Best Designed Document award in a tie decision. Diversified Investment Advisors, a national investment advisory firm specializing in retirement plans, used Dialogue to integrate with its Web-based services to generate a print-on-demand solution for its enrollment education kits and supporting materials. The new system reduces the time and labor required to produce the education kits, while delivering highly customized and personalized content to clients. Benefits of implementing Dialogue include the elimination of multi-piece documents, the ability to target specific participant behavior in order to increase enrollments and contributions, and significant savings in shipping and warehousing costs.
CitiCards, part of the global operations of leading financial services company Citigroup, Inc., used Dialogue to create a monthly statement for credit card customers. In an effort to create an easier-to-read statement, build brand loyalty, and more deeply engage customers, the new statement combines varying typefaces, color, and high-quality charts, graphs, and photographs. Card members have already expressed a greater level of satisfaction with their statement. CitiCards is also using Dialogue to simplify its forms management processes by eliminating the need to use pre-printed stock, which is increasing operational efficiencies leading to a reduction in paper waste. 
The award for Best Application Architecture was given to Unum Group, one of the world's leading employee benefits providers, for the development of Simply UnumSM, a company-wide initiative designed to streamline enrollment with a fast, paperless process and offer self-service components to produce correspondence, business forms, insurance contracts and booklets, and insurance proposals. Unum used Dialogue to develop a system that allows policyholder plan administrators to request contracts interactively online and print them locally, significantly reducing printing, paper, and postage costs. Dialogue is integrated into Unum's new enterprise-wide "no touch" workflow to provide high availability to non-technical users via centralized document storage and retrieval, and document delivery through print, email, and fax media. 
Most Significant Return on Investment this year was awarded to Humana, Inc. for its SmartSummary RxSM statement. This application was developed as an outgrowth of Humana's SmartSummary statements, last year's Most Sophisticated Application winner, and provided the company's Medicare members with highly personalized and engaging statements to help them better understand and manage their healthcare costs. The SmartSummary Rx statement includes several white space areas for personalized messages applying directly to the individual member, allowing Humana to consolidate over 30 different communication vehicles sent to its 3.5 million members every month-reducing costs by $10 million since the new statement was implemented in June, 2006.
Raymond James Financial, Inc. was recognized with the award for Most Sophisticated Application. The diversified financial services company wanted to upgrade its brokerage statements to comply with the discriminating standards of individual clients and financial advisors, as well as to provide a platform for future enhancements. Using Dialogue, Raymond
James now has an intuitive design platform that provides its developers near-instant feedback on design choices. The new brokerage statements are organized into distinct components for more effective information presentation, and statement development cycle time has been reduced by nearly 50 percent.
For the first time, this year judges gave an honorable mention for an outstanding Transpromo application. DST Output, one of the nation's largest and most experienced outsource producers of personalized transactional communications, submitted the winning entry for the redesign of Ford Motor Credit Company's monthly statements, regularly sent to millions of retail and lease customers. Ford Motor Credit Company was an early convert to DST Output's Transpromo capabilities from using Dialogue, with the goal of increasing sales of its Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Jaguar and Volvo vehicles. Adding a customized page and brand information to its 3.8 million statements sent each month, Ford Motor Credit regularly infuses marketing messages and promotional offers that are targeted to its customers' buying patterns and preferences. 
"The creativity and innovation our valued customers employ when using Dialogue to answer their business challenges is nothing short of amazing," said Rich Troksa, president and CEO of Exstream Software. "It's very exciting to get an in-depth look at the many ways Exstream's products and services positively impact the way companies drive business. This year was one of the most impressive ever, and I thank all of the companies that participated."
The North American User Conference is held annually to provide Exstream's North American customers with an opportunity to network with other users and learn new ways to improve customer experience, increase productivity, and grow their business. The 2007 event was sponsored in part by Doculynx, Inc., EarthColor Business Solutions, and Guidewire.