PDF Notes Domino

Erwin Verstraelan of EMD writes about the challenges he faced and the solutions he adopted whilst managing a Lotus Notes data migration to Documentum project for a major pharmaceutical company.

EMD (www.emd.be) is an IBM Premier Partner in Belgium specializing in providing high end consultancy services in the Belgium market. EMD is also Primeapple's (www.primeapple.com) partner in Belgium and provides integration services for its open document solutions.

One of EMD’s customers in Belgium needed to migrate content located in different Lotus Notes applications to Documentum. The content included the body text, the metadata of the Notes document and the attachments, when available. Furthermore, a snapshot of the Notes document, with the attachments in context, needed to be provided. For the latter aspect, DominoPDF was used.

One of the major problems in archiving unstructured data is the challenge of search. Archiving alone is not a solution for complying with various regulations but it must be possible to easily find the document when required. This is why the customer, a large player in the pharmaceutical sector, had decided to install Documentum at a corporate level. However, a large set of valuable documents had been created in different Lotus Notes databases. These had to be integrated.

Now the task was to find a robust, reliable and repeatable way to get the domino data and attachments whilst preserving the metadata to Documentum. After a lot of research they finally decided to go with DominoPDF from Primeapple. DominoPDF was available for evaluation and we completed an end to end pilot before going live with it.

DominoPDF is used to convert each and every domino document along with the metadata information to PDF. This huge PDF collection is then fed to Documentum together with the metadata of the Notes document and the attachments. The PDF document provides the necessary context to understand the relationship between the text and the attachments.

We are very happy to recommend DominoPDF for any of our customers when it comes to creating PDF from Lotus Domino.

About the Author

Erwin Verstraelen is an enterprise solution architect with EMD (www.emd.be). He advises clients on the right technology solution for their business problems in the area of Enterprise Content Management, Unstructured Data and Collaboration. When he is not finding technology solutions to map client problems, he spends time with his wife and two children sailing the Belgian coast and the wonderful waters of the Netherlands. Scuba diving and science fiction are also on the agenda.