IBM ImagePlus Migration for Lousiana State

Data Strategies Interchange today reported on the completion of IBM ImagePlus migration to the Fast Enterprises’ Gentax environment.

The customer, the Louisiana Department of Labor and Industry (LDR), was using IBM’s ImagePlus under z/OS to capture and archive scanned images as well as AFP documents. In 2006, LDR discontinued the use of ImagePlus for the storage of digitized images and began using the image storage component of its tax processing application Gentax, a COTS application developed by Fast Enterprises.

Data Strategies and The Windward Group had bid together for this job. The project was executed in close cooperation with the customer’s technical staff at LDR’s premises in Baton Rouge, LA. It involved the processing of over one thousand optical platters that were stored in three large IBM 3995 optical libraries. The platters were extracted and processed in small batches, so as not to disturb normal operations.

The IBM ImagePlus Migration was performed using Data Strategies’ proven off-line document migration process and platform. Offline migration is a process where DSI performs the migration optimized for best performance independent of end client’s hardware and without hindrance to their daily activities.

The project involved the extraction of approximately 40 million documents (MODCA IOCA and MODCA PTOCA formats) and their conversion to TIFF G4 specified for the ingestion into the target archive. Over 2 TBytes of compressed data were converted.

A particular challenge for this project was the accurate conversion to raster images of various vintages of PTOCA documents, utilizing different types of AFP font resources and font specifications so as to enable the use of existing overlays.

Further information about DSI’s document archive migration services can be found here.