Erwin Verstraelen of EMD writes about the challenges he faced whilst managing a Domino based content dissemination project for a major automobile company.
EMD (www.emd.be) is an IBM Premier Partner located in Belgium specializing in providing high end consultancy services to the Belgium market. EMD is also a partner in Belgium and provides integration services for its open document solutions.
One of EMDs customers in Belgium wanted to disseminate information in a newsletter format to company lobbyists worldwide.
Governments across the world, both in Europe and the United States, get input at the drafting stage of legislation from interested parties, including private companies. For example, when it comes to legislation relating to the Auto Industry, Governments accept inputs from a company like EMD’s customer. In international parlance, this activity is called lobbying. Lobbying is different across different cultures, but there is only one thing which is common for the success for a lobbyist; he needs the right information at the right time, ready to use.
The customer has a worldwide deployment of a Domino based infrastructure. They found the HTML e-mail newsletters going out to lobbyists around the world inconsistent in look and feel and difficult to manage. This resulted in sub-optimal use of the valuable information contained in the newsletter.
EMD built a Domino based application that allowed the storage of relevant information. On a periodic basis, a newsletter is generated in PDF format. EMD used DominoPDF for other customers, so the answer to the problem was quick and easy. Currently, all the electronic newletters are automatically created centrally in PDF using DominoPDF and is distributed worldwide.
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.