FAQ for PIN

If your business requires that you submit paper or electronic documentation on specific forms for government, insurance, or regulatory reporting, these forms can be now be added into your existing Notes applications. With PDF Integrator v4.0 for Notes (PIN), you can now integrate any PDF form directly into your Notes applications with no additional footprint to your infrastructure.

With PIN, these forms can be accessed and completed with your Notes data at the click of a button.

Any collection of Lotus Notes data from multiple documents and/or multiple databases can be entered into a PDF Fillable Form.  The forms can either be predefined (often Regulated / official) or custom-designed.  Using PIN to generate these forms add a new level of functionality to the Lotus Notes workflow.


Questions:


1.  What was used to develop PIN? or What is under the hood of the PIN engine?

2.  Why would I want to buy PIN when I can use iText and/or Apache FOP to develop my own PDFs?


3.  What makes PIN different from any PDF Print driver?

4.  What do you mean by custom or regulated PDFs?

5.  Our developers can write scripts that populate Word documents with Notes data. What is different about PIN?

6.  What is the foot print of PIN?

7.  Can my users who are on the road, like sales reps, use PIN?

8.  I understand that PIN works with Lotus Notes data, but how can I get PIN to work with say DB2, Oracle, SQL, etc.


9.  PIN works well out of the box, but there are workflow and business rules that I need to add to PIN, how do I do that?

10. What versions of Lotus Notes will PIN work on?

11. What are the limitations on the Notes side for source databases & documents?

12. How is PIN licensed?

Answers:


1.  What was used to develop PIN? or What is under the hood of the PIN engine?

PIN is written in Java in the Lotus Notes environment
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2. Why would I want to buy PIN when I can use iText and/or Apache FOP to develop my own PDFs?

Because PIN has done most of the work done for you. All that you really need to do with PIN is create the PDF Fillable Form or use an existing PDF Fillable Form, map the Notes fields to your PDF fields, add three lines of code to your new or existing Lotus Notes Applications and you are done.

In addition, the process of updating or changing how a PDF is produced in PIN is very easy.

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3. What makes PIN different from any PDF Print driver?


PIN is not a PDF Print driver, It is much more than that. PIN allows you to take data from 1 or more Lotus Notes forms from 1 or more Lotus Notes Applications / databases and send the data to a PDF Fillable Form. PIN can work with custom and/or regulated PDFs Fillable Form (which PDF Print Drivers cannot do,)
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4. What do you mean by custom or regulated PDFs?

Custom meaning PDFs that you would use to send to your customers or work with internally, Regulated meaning PDF forms that come from insurance providers such as Medicare, Banking regulation forms, Post Office forms (3615, 3623, NCOA)
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5. Our developers can write scripts that populate Word documents with Notes data. What is different about PIN?

PIN allows you to add data from multiple Notes documents across multiple Notes databases through our mapping interface.

This reduces development time and places the data into a PDF with a  button click.

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6. What is the foot print of PIN?

Next to none. All that PIN requires is a single Notes database on your existing server.

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7. Can my users who are on the road, like sales reps, use PIN?

Yes, you can create a local replica of PIN to each of your sales reps' PCs. One minor modification to the PIN profiles and your are done.
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8. I understand that PIN works with Lotus Notes data, but how can I get PIN to work with say DB2, Oracle, SQL, etc.

You can either pull the data into a Lotus Notes database which PIN can work with, or ATS can develop an interface that allows PIN to work with your data.
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9. PIN works well out of the box, but there are workflow and business rules that I need to add to PIN, how do I do that?
ATS will work with you to integrate PIN to work with any of your business rules and/or workflows that PIN out of the box cannot handle.
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10. What versions of Lotus Notes will PIN work on?


PIN will work with Lotus Notes 8.0 or higher

11. What are the limitations on the Notes side for source databases & documents?

The current limitation, which can be easily expanded, is up to 11 Notes forms, up to 40 fields per Notes form, and can merge data from up to 11 different Notes databases into a single PDF.
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12. How is PIN licensed?


PIN is licensed on a server basis. Each server using PIN must have a separate license and profile. Please keep in mind, that that is for the PIN production database.

By design, PIN can pull data across multiple databases, and across multiple servers. For example, you can easily have your Application Server pulling data from your Web server using a single instance of PIN.
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