Postalite and Dynamics NAV

Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV User Forum
#1

Does anyone of you know of a integration between Postalite (www.postalite.it) and Dynamics NAV?

Or do you even have any documents about this in English - I’m sorry but I don’t read Italian and my Italian company have asked me about it!

#2

Hi Erik

you don’t necessarily need any special integration to send the documents produced by NAV via PostaLite.

As you may know, Poste Italiane (the Italian Post) offers a service named Postel which enables the users to send their mail online; Poste Italiane will then print the documents and deliver them as traditional mail. The service is quick and efficient - and cheap if you send many documents; but generating the files in the format required by Postel is somehow cumbersome. PostaLite is just a simpler method to use Postel. You just print your documents to a virtual printer installed on your system, and it generates a .AFP file. Then you launch PostaLite and connect to their server, and the files are converted and sent to Postel.

So all you have to do in NAV is print your invoices or whatever conforming to some simple rules about the page size/orientation/margins, the position of your company logo, the addressee’s data, and the font faces/sizes you may use for the data. It all sums up to customize the relevant reports.

If you’re interested I can translate the user manual for you. Anyway, in short:

  • page size A4, Portrait, margins: top >7mm, bottom >3mm, left>8mm, right >0mm
  • the company logo must start at X=13mm, Y= 20 to 25mm, and must fit in a rectangle 20x90mm wide
  • the addressees’ data must start at X=110mm, Y=64 to 80mm, with at least 15mm white space all around them
  • you have 5 rows for the data; any of them must start with a special tag: I0 for the name, I1 for a second row for the name (optional), I2 street and number, I3 ZIP code, City, and county abbreviation (only for Italy: MI for Milan, RM for Rome etc, your italian colleagues know them all), I4 country (defaults to ITALIA)
  • you shoud use a sans-serif typeface, all capital letters, no underline, preferably normal (non-bold, non-italic), size from 6 to 36 pt, white background. If you use a standard font such as Arial, Helvetica, Courier, Times New Roman you may also use bold/italic characters
  • you can send your mail almost everywhere, but the country name should be spelled in a way recognised by the system: the Italian denomination is ok, usually so is the English one, and sometimes the French, too. For instance you may send to ITALIA, ITALY, or ITALIE, for RUSSIA (it is the same in Italian and English) you have also FEDERAZIONE RUSSA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION, FEDERATION DE RUSSIE (but not simply RUSSIE). I suppose you will leave that to your italian colleagues

This is more or less all you need to build a simple solution. If you want a more complex thing, PostaLite is really an ActiveX control, so it should be possible to drive the whole application from within NAV; but I suppose one should contact the producers (Zucchetti) for the API specification.

One last thing: I suggest you download the user manual from their site: login as user demo, password demo, select “Configurazione” and then “Specifiche per l’invio postale”. Even if you can’t read Italian, you’ll find the list of allowed fonts (remember: grassetto = bold, corsivo = italic) and the country names recognized by the system, as well as some graphic representation of how your document should look like

Let me know if you need further informations

Gianni

#3

Hi Gianni,

Thank you for a very good answer. I might get back to you when we start our implementation if I may…

#4

You’re welcome [:)]

Gianni