Mark Elsdon of FSI (UK) Limited discusses his experiences of building a Notes to PDF archiving solution using DominoPDF for a UK Local Government customer. FSI (UK) Limited is a UK based IBM Advanced Partner engaged in consulting services.
FSI (UK) Limited has integrated DominoPDF with a Lotus Domino based HR Case Management solution for a major UK Local Government institution. The solution is used by the Local County Council for handling hundreds of cases each year along with all the related messages, letters, e-mails and meeting notes that need archiving into a single PDF.
Notes & Domino Archiving – Business Problem
The HR Management Advice Team of the Local Government consists of 12 employees and is responsible for supporting the management with matters relating to Dismissal, Arbitration, Contractual Disputes, and Performance Issues amongst the 22,000 employees.
The Lotus Domino based HR Case Management project was designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the HR team. It provides rapid access to Case Notes and chronological Case History, automation of letters and e-mails, management information on team operational performance, and the archiving of case material. The system is used to hold all the case data, together with all the attachments (letters, reports, spreadsheets, scanned documents, etc.) associated with the case.
Case material derives from a variety of sources, emails, telephone calls, electronic and paper documents, and the project was designed to bring all this information together in a conveniently accessible format to facilitate the work of the HR Advisors.
During the project definition stage, the user team requested a feature to archive closed case data automatically as PDF files. The alternative being to “Cut & Paste” case attachments manually which was impractical given the high number of cases closed each month?
In the ensuing market search by FSI (UK) Limited, DominoPDF was identified as an off-the-shelf product with many of the necessary features.
Notes Domino Archiving – Use Cases
Some cases affect only a single employee, others affect multiple employees. Up to 500 employees can be grouped into a single case.
Case data consists of
• A case record.
• Multiple event records, detailing all activities in the case.
• Multiple task records, detailing actions taken and pending actions, with due dates and actual dates for reporting on adherence to SLA’s.
Task records are used to generate reminders to Advisors, facilitating timely completion of pending actions. Event records can include links to emails and letters generated from templates, either automatically or on demand.
When cases are closed, all the data is to be archived as PDF’s and transferred to a Document Management System.
For each case, there is a need to have
• One PDF containing all the user screens for the case and all attachments for the case.
• For cases involving multiple employees, one PDF for each employee, containing only the data and attachments pertaining to the employee.
The PDF’s to be produced need to include both data shown in the browser screen, and file attachments, drawn from potentially a large number of Domino documents. In addition, the following attachment types are to be supported for inclusion in PDF’s
• Word (.doc, .docx)
• Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
• Text (.txt)
• Graphics (.jpg, .tiff)
• PDF (.pdf)
Because of the potentially very high volume of data to be archived, the ideal solution should be a high performance server side application with consistent results.
Notes Domino Archiving – Solution using Domino PDF
The IBM Lotus Notes Domino archiving software runs a Domino LotusScript agent to generate all of the required URL’s to submit to DominoPDF and to extract all the attachments to be included.
All that is needed by DominoPDF is a URL. All URL’s include an optional URL argument, to indicate whether the output is for a user or for the entire case. Based on this URL argument, the system hides navigation links and buttons and any data which should not be included (for Data Protection reasons) for the particular employee, when creating output from DominoPDF.
Because of the large volume of data potentially processed in large cases, the PDF archive process is run overnight, to avoid performance degradation of the server during the working day.
We found the following major benefits with the DominoPDF solution,
• Reduced project implementation lead time as the DominoPDF API provides a simple structure by using just a few lines of code.
• Willingness to provide technical support during pre-sales, project implementation and post implementation and were proactive in adding certain additional features necessary for the project.
About The Author
The goal of FSI (UK) is to provide truly Open Source applications with the latest web enablement technologies which have been implemented by leading organisations such as Harrods, The Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal, Pyramid Drilling, The Pensions Board, The Scottish Courts Service, Circle Housing, Merseyside Police, West Lothian Council and Oxfordshire County Council.