PDF Notes Domino

Don Koepnick of JC Steele, a mid-sized US manufacturing company talks about his experience in managing a Lotus Domino to Microsoft Exchange migration project using DominoPDF.

At JC Steele we manufacture Clay Working Machinery used by brick, tile, and mineral processing companies worldwide.

Our company is leaving the Domino platform and moving to Microsoft Exchange for email and calendaring. We have a custom Domino document database which contains all the documents relating to each major machinery order from 1999 till date.

This database cannot be moved to a Microsoft based solution without a significant amount of software purchases and a great deal of training for the people involved in the conversion.

The resulting solutions are all far more complex than our situation demands. This database is accessed by a wide range of users, mostly in read only mode. The majority of the users have limited computer skills, and the navigation and access needs to be simple. There are two administrators and about 18 additional users who use this database.

Because this is primarily an archive database, there will be very little updating, inserting or deleting. The DominoPDF solution would give us an easily accessable and searchable set of documents, that anyone can access without special software, or special training.

The other option we looked at was Microsoft Share Point Server based, and involved setting up another server, and then installing client software, some of which would not run on the older computers that our less demanding users have.

The DominoPDF solution is the only one we found that would result in a database that would be simple and intuitive for our users.

About the Author

My primary job is Chief Financial Officer, but in a mid-sized company, everyone in management wears many hats. We have no IT department, so IT is a secondary job for me and one other person.

I have been involved with computers since the pre-pc days, and like most old dogs, have had to learn a lot of new tricks. I am one of those people who knows enough to realize when I am getting in over my head, and will call for help when necessary.

The Domino platform is a holdover from the days when we ran an IBM System 36 with a few PCs attached along with a lot of dumb terminals. Getting support for a small Domino installation like ours is almost impossible, so we decided to ditch the Domino server.