PDF Notes Domino

Scott Hooks of Lotus911 writes about his reason for choosing DominoPDF for a PDF automation project for Angel Flight.

Angel Flight of Georgia is a non-profit volunteer pilot organization that provides free air transportation for people that have a medical need that can’t be filled in their local area, so that the cost of travel never stands in the way of receiving medical care.

During hurricane Katrina, there was extreme stress on Angel Flight of processes and workflows with an urgent need to rapidly expand to safely and adequately handle increased demand.

IBM and Lotus 911 worked together to rapidly develop and deploy an online Lotus Notes-based system that streamlined and automated many of Angel Flight processes so that they could meet these demands.

One element of the time-saving system was the need to create "pilot packs" from multiple sources of information stored in Lotus Domino databases in a format that could be sent via email to any recipient with the format preserved.

PDF was a natural choice and DominoPDF made it very easy to create the necessary documents from the Domino data. DominoPDF will make it so the user of the application will be able to create and send documents to the client with ease.

Currently they were copying data from several Notes documents and pasting it into an Excel document and then manually emailing or faxing to the client. Now with one click they will be able to create the PDF documents and have those stored in a document library and then emailed to the customer, saving hours out of their hectic days.

Other options we looked into were the SDK from Adobe as well as using iText. DominoPDF was decided upon because of its ease of use and flexibility of using formula, Lotus Script and Java languages.