SWING PDF Converter Review:
Keep your Lotus documents intact with SWING PDF Converter
By Molley Burgo
at AEP
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Have you ever had a Lotus Notes document that you would like to store or send outside of Lotus Notes, but can't figure out how to make sure the document stays intact? Like with attachments, embedded images, rich text (colors, fonts, etc), and layout of the form?
Well, SWING PDF Converter can do that for you! It will basically "take a picture of the document" and store it as a PDF file outside of Lotus Notes! There's nothing to install or have the admins set up on the server -- just make sure all of the SWING design elements are included in your database, and have at it!
This has been especially refreshing for me, since I'm currently working on 2 separate projects (among others) that each want to pull data from Lotus Notes, but want to do it in different ways. One of the projects wants to make sure to keep the format of the form, and all rich text elements intact, and they are thrilled with the PDF concept. The other would rather export the individual pieces of data, attachments, embedded images, etc, into a different db structure, and it's been a nightmare!
It didn't take too much time to figure out how to work with the Converter, since my team needed it to do a few more things than just shoot out PDF files. I've been testing and "working with the software" for a few months now, and it seems like it could be a "lifesaver" for people who need to get documents out of Lotus Notes and keep them intact! That is, if they are ok with PDF files. For the most part, there's some documentation about how to work with it - that may be a small, picky area of improvement. Maybe just a bit more documentation. Also, from what I've seen so far, the software expects there to be an "Alternate Form" that it will use to model the converted PDF file. That makes it a little bit less dynamic, if multiple dbs or multiple docs with different forms are to be converted, but I plan to see if I can do something about that on my end. :}
SWING PDF Converter is still "working out some kinks," but the support team was amazingly quick and pleasant to work with if I ever had questions or concerns. I would definitely recommend this solution to anyone looking for a good way to get intact docs out of Lotus Notes!