Both of the DMM Advance Notices in today's PB are for rulings that take effect 2 Jan 2011. (NOTE: there are also 4 posters included in this PB that the USPS is using to remind employees of procedures for accepting mail you might find interesting, such as the things to check for PVDS mail)
The first, "Submission of Electronic Documentation With Comailed and Copalletized Mailings," references the Federal Register Notice (FRN) final rule of 7 Sep 2010 requiring mailers of comailed or copalletized mailpieces (or mail owners who contribute mailpieces to a consolidated or comailed mailing) to submit electronic documentation; that's the place to go if you really want to know all the details! The electronic documentation can be either via Mail.XML or Mail.dat, but electronic postage statements generated via the Postal Wizard do not satisfy this requirement. This ruling also requires use of Intelligent Mail® tray or sack labels and Intelligent Mail pallet placards.
For mailers entering some of their letter-size mail in trays at origin and sending the rest to a consolidator, they must "prepare separate postage statements for the portion of the mailing being accepted at the origin site, and separate electronic postage statements for the portion being directed to a consolidator" (for example, in Presort they might split their Mail.dat by scheme if they enter all the palletized portion themselves but take the mail that would be separately trayed to a consolidator). Consolidators will be responsible for updating the electronic documentation for the portion of the mailing they manipulate.
The other ruling, "Optional Mail Preparation Standards for Flat-Size Mailpieces in FSS
Zones," references the FRN of 23 Aug 2010 outlining standards for preparing flat-size Standard Mail, Periodical and BPM for areas served by the new Flats Sequencing System (FSS). One of the conceptual changes with these standards is how "bundle size" is interpreted. Rather than the traditional min and max bundle size, there is more of a "target size" concept, since the bundles need to be placed into 12" containers that will be fed into the FSS machines. When Presort supports this (support will be in the next production release), setting the FSS bundle size to 4" won't be setting the minimum, it will be setting the target, and Presort will make bundles as close to 4" in size as it can (so 3 of these bundles would fit in the 12" container).
The new sort levels for FSS are the FSS sort plan level and the FSS facility sort. Much more documentation of this will be in the Presort release notes coming with the next release, but you might think of the FSS sort plan as a kind of 5-digit scheme; this is the level used to make all the FSS bundles. Then pallets are made from that same collection; any FSS bundles that could not be placed on an FSS sort plan pallet will be considered for an FSS facility pallet. You might think of this level as another kind of SCF level - it's a collection of the FSS sort plan levels.
Since this PB says this optional FSS sortation "will become mandatory in the future" at some unspecified time, you will want to start considering the impact it will have, especially with how the container and bundle charges will be applied for Periodicals mail.
The rest of this PB appears to be of the "normal" variety. Check back in two weeks (or less, if you're remembering the issues we've had lately), when the next PB should have some labeling list updates.
