Products > NIMF (Network Image Manipulation Facility)
System Overview
Background
Much of the legacy knowledge of pharmaceutical clients and of past and potential partners is contained only in paper form. The first step in the fulfillment of the strategy of content management is to render that paper into electronic format. The vast amount of this legacy knowledge argues for the need of a high-volume solution. The importance of this knowledge demands a high-quality solution.
The problem of managing knowledge captured in the physical medium of paper negatively affects accessibility of that knowledge by researchers, clinicians, medical writers, and submission management science personnel. The impact of this affects the speed at which such knowledge is communicated as well as the breadth of the audience to which it is distributed. This limits the efficacy of internal processes, such as submission assembly, as well as external processes regarding licensing partnerships or legal defense of drug products.
A successful solution would preserve the advantages of paper (portability, and ease of assimilation) while enabling content management with various electronic-based tools such as Document management systems, knowledge taxonomies and as yet unforeseen computer-based tools.
Business Need
The preservation of the utility of paper is satisfied by the use of the PDF format, which is identical to the original and can be printed on demand to recover the original in identical form. The implementation of a network-based, high-volume engine to produce PDF renditions of paper originals provides for utility by any number of document and knowledge management systems that need the content represented on paper in electronic form. The advantages of a Mentalix- based solution over the current Adobe-based system include (but are not limited to) lower cost of ownership, higher performance higher stability/reliability, more administrative functionality and more detailed status and performance metrics.
User Profile
The NIMF service is targeted for use by Regulatory and Clinical Systems in support of applications requiring TIF to PDF conversion. This "NIMF" will provide the regulatory group a service with the processing power necessary to convert thousands of scanned Tiff images into an OCR'd PDF format, thereby reducing their dependency on both outside conversion resources and slower, less reliable internal resources. Again, because of the nature of this service, there are no direct users of the system, only indirect users through other applications. There will be different applications that use NIMF for its conversion needs. So the only direct user of the service will be the applications while indirectly, all of the users of these applications will be relying on this service for their conversions.
System Description
The scope of this plan includes a description of the development process and the methods employed to develop a new product (NIMF) incorporating JMS Technology to WebLogic 8.1. This conversion engine will be used to create a true parallel processing cluster of workstations dedicated to converting TIFF images into PDF format. This system, referred to as a "NIMF", will provide the ability to convert thousands of TIF images into PDF format on multiple systems concurrently thereby significantly improving throughout and reliability. |
