About Ami Pro Converter — Our Story

Why We Built This

Ami Pro Converter began as a side project after we kept seeing the same scene at law firms, records departments, and university libraries: a shared drive full of .sam files that no current program would open. Contracts, board minutes, case notes, policy manuals, grant reports, dissertations — decades of writing, frozen behind a format whose application was discontinued in the 1990s and never given a modern import filter.

The available options were not great. Word has no Ami Pro filter. LibreOffice, which normally rescues obsolete formats, has never shipped one either. Cloud converters demanded uploading confidential documents to unknown servers, and the handful of desktop tools that claimed .SAM support dropped the diagrams, equations, and style sheets that made the documents readable in the first place.

So we built the tool ourselves. What started as a way to rescue one firm's litigation archive grew into something teams across industries needed: a fast, private, bulk Ami Pro converter that treats your documents — and the rules around them — with the care they deserve.

Our Mission: Recovering the Past, Powering the Future

An astonishing amount of institutional memory — signed agreements, regulatory filings, committee minutes, engineering specifications, published research — is trapped in a "digital basement" of Lotus Ami Pro documents. While the world moved on to Word, SharePoint, and private LLMs, the tools to bridge that gap were either abandoned along with the format or required compromising on privacy.

We decided to build a better way — one that respects the legal weight of old records and the realistic scale of institutional archives.

Why We Are Different

1. Privacy is Not Optional

In an era of "free" cloud file converters, we take a different stand. Your client files, personnel records, patient letters, and unpublished research should never leave your machine. Ami Pro Converter is a native Windows application that processes every file locally. No cloud, no uploads, no risk to privilege, GDPR, HIPAA, or contractual confidentiality.

2. Built for Bulk, Built for Long Documents

If you have one Ami Pro file, you almost certainly have thousands. We optimized Ami Pro Converter for speed and scale: scan an entire folder tree, read Ami Pro 1.2, 2.x, and 3.x files including OS/2, DOS-era, and SZDD-compressed variants, apply the matching .STY style sheet automatically, and preserve the original folder hierarchy in the converted output. Hundreds of documents finish in minutes, not days.

3. AI-Ready Text, Not Just Files

Your organization's written history shouldn't be invisible to modern AI. We focus on high-fidelity conversion to formats LLMs and search pipelines actually use: clean Markdown with real heading levels for chunking, semantic HTML for intranet indexes, plain TXT for bulk analysis, and DOCX when someone simply wants to keep editing. Your legacy knowledge is ready to fuel private RAG pipelines and search.

4. Audit-Friendly by Design

Regulated organizations don't just need conversion — they need a paper trail. Every batch run produces a local conversion log you can attach to retention records, change tickets, or audit responses. Nothing is sent to us, and nothing is silently dropped. What you converted, when, and where the output went lives in a file you control.

The Professional's Choice

Whether you're a paralegal reconstructing a 1990s case file, an archivist processing a donated collection, an IT lead clearing out a retired file server before a cloud migration, or an AI engineer feeding institutional documents into a private LLM, Ami Pro Converter provides the specialized, high-performance toolkit you need to make legacy Ami Pro documents useful again.

Modernize your Ami Pro archives without compromising your documents — or your security.