DominoPDF was created initially to meet the growing need for creating PDF documents from Domino, however it has also emerged to be very useful in Lotus migration projects.
Once you are acquainted to Lotus Notes and its programming, you develop certain affection for the platform. We love the Domino platform and eagerly await each release from IBM.
We have various customers who use DominoPDF for Lotus Notes migration projects, both big and small.
Recently a major Domino consulting company was tasked with converting over 6 million Lotus Notes documents across 10 databases to Portable Document Format (PDF) as part of a company wide migration to a new platform for one of UK’s largest banking organisations.
A great deal of business logic had to be applied to the lotus migration process including; batch management, generating unique identifiers to a prescribed formula, recursive processing of response hierarchies, saving of attachments, stripping newlines and delimiters from text, generation of XML index data, XSLT post-processing, error handling, etc.
The migration to the new platform covered a number of key components, one of which was the Notes document to PDF conversion. DominoPDF was chosen as the solution for handling the PDF conversion for the following reasons. An important factor in the migration was the performance of the conversion process as there was a short time available when the large number of documents had to be converted before being moved to the new platform.
To achieve the throughput required a number of high specification dedicated machines were be used. Three servers each with 4 Gb of memory, two with 4 CPUs (2.8 GHz Xeon) and one with 2 CPUs (also 2.8 GHz Xeon), each running between 4 to 7 concurrent Domino agents to convert “batches” of many documents at one time (approximately 6 documents per second sustained for 24 hours). DominoPDF provided seamless integration with LotusScript agents in either a connected or scheduled environment, together with robust usage in a demanding concurrent agent scenario.
The legacy Notes databases stored documents containing a wide range of data and formatting (fonts, tables, graphics etc.) which had to be accurately retained once converted to PDF.
DominoPDF uses the Domino HTTP task itself to request formatted Notes data thereby ensuring all elements and properties of the documents are accurately maintained.
It was also important to ensure the final PDF document could be viewed in all versions of Adobe Reader. The business users who would be viewing the PDF documents used a wide range of versions from v5 right up to the latest release. Adobe Reader v9 imposes much stricter rules for valid PDF documents and DominoPDF ensured all PDF documents remained compatible with all versions.
The business users also used a custom font for internal formatting purposes which had to be maintained in the final PDF output. DominoPDF supports font embedding, allowing a user who does not have the custom font on their machine to still read the PDF with all formatting intact.
We worked closely with the developers to provide timely and effective support whenever needed, ensuring the DominoPDF part of the migration was successfully delivered.