Quote:
Originally Posted by HamsterRage
Well, this was a report coming from a back-end system, not from any MS Office or desktop application.
So it took work for us to figure out how to create PDF's on our Unix server where the legacy application was running and then send them to the user. Not that it was difficult, just something that had to be retrofitted. We use a nifty piece of software called PCL2PDF that does a very nice job of taking printer-ready output using PCL5 and turning that into PDF files.
|
Okay, makes sense. I've looked at PCL2PDF, but didn't have an actual use for it. (I'm a *nix admin, among other things.)
Quote:
|
But that's not really the point of the story. The admin never questioned the sanity of taking the paper, still warm from the printer, running it through the scanner and then shredding it! Even though she had to know that we were sending PDF reports all around the office (probably even to her).
|
I've seen lots of that, though it's really bemusing when the ability to generate the PDF herself exists.
I got my first taste of it in the late '70's, working at a bank. One of my hats was resident expert in the mainframe based financial modelling system the bank used to generate the monthly expense numbers for management. The reports did comparisons: actuals better/worse than budget, actuals better/worse than forecast. The budget and forecast numbers were plugged in by the financial analysts in the areas. The actual numbers came from the bank's G/L system, also on the mainframe. Each month, the G/L first post would come out, and everybody got a printout. The analysts would then spend hours manually transcribing numbers from the printout into the appropriate place in the modelling system.
I spent a few weeks wandering around saying "Why are people manually re-entering this stuff when both pieces of software run on the mainframe? Why don't you program an interface from the G/L to the modelling system to do that automatically? Why are you paying MBA's $30K a year to be data entry clerks?"
Put that way, the light bulb came on over various heads in my region, and I was authorized to talk to DP about getting it done. The VP/Applications Development was delighted: it was a project that was doable and worth doing, and something his folks could get out the door and see meaningful results. They had been largely tasked to support Marketing, which could never figure out what it really needed, and whose requests tended to be ill-defined moving targets.
About half of what I did was serve as interface, translating user needs into things DP could understand. They had different mindsets and languages, so no surprise the obvious was overlooked.
______
Dennis