| | National Travelers Life ensures easy file transfers for field agents using WS_FTP Pro
For nearly 100 years, National Travelers Life (NTL) has been leading the way in providing high-quality insurance products for people across the United States. Whenever the company has identified a new area that requires insurance, they've quickly created new products and services to address these needs. From traditional life to annuities to cancer and critical illness insurance, National Travelers Life has been at the forefront of providing comprehensive insurance solutions for consumers. This commitment to innovation has helped the company achieve great success for nearly a century.
Embracing new technology has allowed the insurance company to stay at the top of their game. For example, recently, the Web team at National Travelers Life was faced with a challenge.
Our field agents make presentations at various companies. During the presentation, enrollment forms are completed for individuals who want to buy one of our insurance products, said Andy Kearns, Web designer/developer at NTL. Once we had this data on the agents' laptops, we needed a way to send the completed enrollment forms to central processing in our home office in West Des Moines, Iowa. The fact that the 3,000 field agents are geographically dispersed only added to the challenge faced by the Web team. That's when NTL looked at using secure FTP to transfer its enrollment forms. FTP (file transfer protocol) uploads or downloads files between a local PC and a remote FTP server over the Internet. It's a more efficient and faster way to transfer files than via e-mail, which often bogs down mail servers and bandwidth.
NTL turned to WS_FTP Pro and WS_FTP Server from Ipswitch, Inc. WS_FTP Pro boasts millions of users worldwide and is the most popular FTP client for transferring files over the Internet. When used in conjunction with WS_FTP Server, it provides a reliable method for transferring files.
To be honest, WS_FTP Pro wasn't the first product we looked at. We tried an FTP product from a different vendor, but we got hung up on several technical issues when it came to the programming aspect, said Kearns. When we contacted this vendor's technical support, they were not responsive at all. Ipswitch's technical support group was immediately able to help us during the development phase.
A key factor in NTL's decision to use WS_FTP Pro was the product's scripting features, which allow users to automate file transfers and management tasks such as creating a script that instructs WS_FTP Pro to upload selected files at the same time each week.
Because of WS_FTP Pro's scripting capability, our field agents don't even know that they are using FTP, said Cynthia Merritt, database administrator and Web developer at NTL. Everything is automated into a Visual Basic application, so all they have to do is push a few buttons to upload the enrollment forms to our server. WS_FTP works seamlessly, which was one of our goals.
For a tech-savvy insurance company like National Travelers Life, the combination of WS_FTP Pro and WS_FTP Server provided all the assurance they needed for fast, easy, and secure file transfers.
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