NCH was able to decommission the Domino server while preserving access to their historical records for future reference.
CUSTOMER
NCH Corporation
INDUSTRY
Chemicals
SOFTWARE
COUNTRY
United States
EMPLOYEES
7,500+
Customer
NCH Corporation is a global leader in industrial, commercial, and institutional maintenance products and services, and one of the largest companies in the world to sell such products through direct marketing. With over 8,500 employees and manufacturing plants located on six continents, NCH Corporation’s extensive and varied product line is distributed in more than 50 countries, with continuing growth prospects.
Challenge
The IT department was decommissioning old servers and applications in order to reduce NCH’s risk footprint. One of the servers was a Domino server which hosted an old Lotus Notes Domino document repository that was no longer in use. Before the server could be shut down, it was necessary to first extract all the documents from this repository because it contained important intellectual property data. The task seemed simple at first, until it was realized that there were over 8000 documents in the repository, and it would have taken hundreds of hours to export/print the documents to PDF one at a time.
Solution
NCH Corporation undertook a web research in order to find a software to help automate the export process. However, it proved difficult to find such a software since the repository databases were created in Lotus Notes 4.5, and all the software NCH could find worked only on versions 5.0 or higher.
JT Thompson, IT Security Program Manager at NCH, said: “SWING Software’s PDF Converter software also only worked with Notes version 6.5 or higher, but we noticed that they were also offering Lotus Notes export services. After contacting SWING Software and discussing the Notes version issue, it was found that the version 4.5 will not pose a big problem after all and that SWING Software could process our database easily. After conducting a quick proof of concept, we decided to let SWING Software export our data for us.”
“SWING Software was great to work with and it only took a few weeks from to start to finish. We highly recommend SWING Software for anything IBM Notes and Domino related!”
— JT Thompson, IT Security Program Manager
Results
SWING Software successfully exported the two NSF databases into a searchable PDF format within a few business days. The databases were about 1.5 GB in size and contained 8000+ documents with attachments. This saved NCH hundreds of man hours trying to do it manually, and also there was the added benefit of retaining the Notes attachments and Notes doclinks. With the export completed, NCH was able to freely decommission the Domino server which significantly reduced the risk footprint while at the same time the internal department was able to get continued access to their historical records for reference.
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