GWTreecast Improves GroupWise Collaboration at INFORM
Background
Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Aachen, Germany, INFORM specializes in IT systems for optimized planning and control of business processes. Strongly committed to providing turn-key solutions, the company offers application consultancy and go-live assistance, as well as long-term maintenance and support, as integral parts of every project they develop for their customers. Since 1986 INFORM has enjoyed sustained growth of about 25 %. Today, the company employs more than 300 software engineers and business consultants. The staff at INFORM relies on Novell GroupWise as its collaboration system. They use Treecast, known as GWTreecast since its acquisition by Messaging Architects, to centrally manage their knowledgebase repository, as well as their support department. Treecast is a Shared Folders management solution for GroupWise which integrates with eDirectory and allows the building of GroupWise Shared Folders without end-user intervention. Treecast can broadcast entire trees to users’ accounts and maintain the folder’s hierarchy and is also capable to rebuild the trees in the end users accounts in case of accidental deletion, move or renaming of folders.
Scenario1: Using Treecast to Make INFORM’s Knowledgebase Easily Accessible
One of the ways that INFORM makes takes advantage of the GroupWise Shared Folders functionality is using it to make its knowledgebase available to its consultants. Each topic is contained in a shared folder at the root of the account, which is then subdivided into a complex hierarchical structure with respective subfolders containing solutions to the different issues pertaining to the main topic.
"Clearly, it would be very annoying every time we created a new entry into the knowledgebase, i.e., a new shared subfolder, for knowledgebase users to have to manually accept the share and then recreate the exact hierarchical structure of the knowledgebase," explains Peter Wachs, GroupWise Administrator at INFORM, who is in charge of managing Treecast. "Treecast works great. If we have to add a new colleague to the knowledgebase, all I have to do is open the Treecast application, add the user and the entire hierarchical structure is automatically pushed down into his account. There is no need for GroupWise re-sharing, accepting the share, or trying to recreate the shared tree manually. Treecast does it for you automatically."
Scenario 2: Using Treecast to Provide INFORM’s Support Department Access to Their Accounts
INFORM’s large Support department also uses Treecast to manage customer tickets as efficiently as possible. All customers are classified in shared folders and subfolders accessible to all support engineers for timely follow-up. As new colleagues join the team, they are just a Treecast click away from being granted access to the support accounts. For a company that prides itself on its excellence of customer service and ability to provide support globally across 18 time zones, having the right tools to ensure efficiency and high productivity is very important. Treecast allows them to maintain the high level of excellence in their service
Bottomline: "Treecast Makes GroupWise Collaboration Easier and Saves Us a Lot of Time"
As the Treecast administrator at INFORM, Wachs says the following about the Treecast administrator interface: "The application is very intuitive to use and everything is on a single screen with a contextual menu. Logically, everything is where it should be. This is a very good product that I would recommend to anyone as it is simple to use, yet it is able to save you a lot of time managing GroupWise Shared Folders."
