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Trinity College School is a coeducational day and boarding school located in Ontario, Canada. Dr DuBroy, Director of Reports, contacted Northwind IT Systems with a view to automating the distribution of quarterly reports to parents.

Childrens' reports are compiled and reviewed in a Lotus Approach database and initially, were printed and mailed to parents every three months. However, a growing proportion of parents would like to receive the reports by e-mail attachment in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format.

Dr DuBroy had been able to meet this need at first by printing individual reports to PDF files and e-mailing them one by one. This was a time consuming process and once the number of such e-mails grew to several hundred it became impractical to carry out manually.

Fortunately, Northwind had two ready made ActiveX controls designed for the very purpose. Trinity College School already used Microsoft Outlook so OLServices could provide the existing Approach application with the automated bulk e-mail functions.

Our printer management library, PDXPro, in conjunction with the Zeon DocuCom PDF driver contains the procedures to carry out batch creation of PDF files from an Approach application.

It was then simple to create a LotusScript procedure to process the found set of reports, render each one as a PDF file and attach it to an e-mail addressed to the parent. Dr DuBroy can now distribute all the reports by e-mail with a single button click, saving a considerable amount of time and effort! He was delighted with the results as this short note attests:

I just wanted to let you know that I ran the emailed reports last night, and everything went perfectly. A task that used to take me a couple of days (generating 300 reports in pdf format one by one and then emailing them one by one) took less than an hour. This is what automating processes by computer is supposed to be all about!

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