IBM Notes and SWING PDF Converter turn out to be the perfect combination for both email records and job order documents
CUSTOMER
GRZ IT Center GmbH
INDUSTRY
Information Technology and Services
SOFTWARE
COUNTRY
Austria
EMPLOYEES
201-500
Customer
GRZ IT Center Linz GmbH (GRZ IT Center) is one of the largest data centers in Austria. While originally positioned as a provider of data center services for banks, it has since expanded its service range far beyond the financial sector and is today engaged in providing services and solutions in several industries.
Challenge
The GRZ IT Center uses several Notes workflow applications for managing job execution orders in various mainframe applications. Between 50 and 100 users work with these Notes applications, generating approximately 1500 documents each month. These documents contain information about the various orders and job completions. As part of the workflow, the generated documents also need to be forwarded to customers who typically do not use Lotus Notes. Therefore, the first requirement was to have a solution which will convert Notes documents in their entirety to PDF format for sharing with non-Notes users.
An additional requirement was to archive large volumes of Notes e-mails as electronic records in PDF format. Each month, about 5000 e-mail records would need to be converted to PDF and then imported into “Windream”, an archiving system already deployed at GRZ IT Center.
Finally, both the document and e-mail exports to PDF would have to take place automatically, on a 64-bit Windows Server, without user intervention.
Solution
“IBM Notes as a workflow system together with SWING PDF Converter turned out to be the perfect combination for us.”
— Siegfried Kletzander, Team Leader
Previously, the GRZ IT Center deployed a different PDF export solution. However, over time the solution failed to provide for new developing requirements, such as support for Windows Server 2008 64-bit OS. Therefore several new products were being evaluated, and SWING PDF Converter was chosen as the best solution which met all their selection criteria.
In order to enable automated exporting of Notes documents and e-mails to PDF, SWING PDF Converter was installed on a central server and several Archiving Jobs were created using the PDF Converter user interface. The Archiving Jobs were set to run on a daily basis and convert selected databases and mailboxes to PDF files which then get saved in a network folder. Finally, the “Windream” archiving system ‘reads’ the network folder in pre-defined time intervals and automatically imports any newly found PDF files from this location.
“SWING PDF Converter is the perfect tool for fulfilling all our requirements”, said Siegfried Kletzander, a Team Leader at GRZ IT Center. “Furthermore, it offers many features we would like to use in future versions of our software products.”
Results
By providing an automated way of converting Notes documents and emails to PDF, GRZ IT Center was able to save an estimated 300-400 man-hours per month, which would otherwise be spent for converting and archiving of Notes content in a manual fashion.
SWING PDF Converter is currently used to process three key Notes applications and many mailboxes. In the coming months several more applications are scheduled to be included in the automated PDF export process.
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