Ways of issuing cards
- Nikoleta Perry
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course serves as a starting point for beginning users of the ALIVE Platform. It informs about basic ways of card issuing and tries to define the specifics of these different ways. It also includes URL links to other, more detailed courses to individual modules of the ALIVE Platform.
After taking this course, you should be able to distinguish what ways of issuing cards through the ALIVE Platform will suit your needs.
As prerequisities to this course, please take a look at our other courses “Introduction of Alive Platform”
WAYS OF ISSUING THE CARDS
When you are going to start using the ALIVE Platform, you should know about different ways how cards can be issued (see the picture below). Based on basic analysis, you should choose the way of card issuing that best fits your needs.
DESCRIPTION OF DIFFERENT WAYS OF HOW CARDS CAN BE ISSUED
ONLINE ORDERING (OO)
Customers order their cards using an Online Ordering Form, where they specify which card they want to order, upload their photo and ID documents and they pay for their cards online. After that, cards are issued and they are sent to customers through the way the customers choose (it can be personal pick up, post, post registered letter, courier etc.). In case of virtual card, the card is always sent through the email. You can find more information in following courses: How to use Online Ordering Form How to work with Online Ordering application How to edit email templates
CARD ISSUING (CI)
Cards are issued “on the spot” in Branches, that are located in city centers, at railroad stations etc. The great thing at Card Issuing is that your user pays for his/her card and he/she gets it immediately and can use it at the same moment. On the other hand, it is for example not possible to extend validity of cards issued through CI. You can find more information in following courses: How to work with Card Issuing Card Issuing for users
NATIONAL CARD DATABASE (NCDB)
NCDB is the “core application” of the ALIVE Platform. To say it in simple way – all modules of the ALIVE Platform communicate with NCDB, take data from it and send data into it. So, when using the ALIVE Platform, you often communicate with NCDB, even without being aware of it.
NCDB ORDERS
Cards for students are issued through “NCDB Orders” and printed directly from NCDB or from printer that cooperates with NCDB through API or some software. It means all data for cards are stored in NCDB and they are pulled out from there when the cards are going to be printed.
You can find more information in following courses: How to process “NCDB Orders Batch Card Printing “
EXTERNAL ISSUERS
The way of External Issuers can be used when there are many of cards that should be printed and for the school/university is better to print it using its own card printer or in an external printing company. In this way, the whole process of issuing card runs outside the ALIVE Platform and, at the end, the school only sends to NCDB a message that the cards were issued. The school sends this message through our API (preferably), or through manual importing of an excel file with issued cards.
You can find more information in following courses: How to work with external card issuers
Important: Please mind that when you want to issue ANY cards through the ALIVE Platform, first you have to put serial numbers into the system. How to do it, you can find in our course How to understand Serial Ranges. Still not sure which way would fit your business model? Have a look at our detailed table and try to fit your business processes into one or more ways this table describes! We can then help you what exactly you need to set up.