EWI
Managing Shared Folders in GroupWise
GWTreecast from Messaging Architects brings significant savings in time and productivity at EWI
Executive Summary
EWI is a reinsurance company which helps individuals and other insurance organizations address risk assessment and management strategies and assists companies in understanding how their catastrophe risk fits into an enterprise-wide assessment of profitability and shareholder value. EWI relies on Novell GroupWise for collaboration and leverages GroupWise Shared Folders to securely manage all corporate projects. To distribute its complex trees of Shared Folders across the company, the organization uses GWTreecast, which provides centralized administration and easy management, saving time and dramatically enhancing productivity at EWI.
Background
EWI develops intelligent, transparent, efficient, reinsurance services in the property, casualty and life accident, and health areas and also assists insurance companies in raising capital. The company’s collaboration system, Novell GroupWise, ensures that operations are carried out smoothly and in accordance with company policies. As an organization belonging to the insurance sector, EWI is required to comply with regulations regarding the confidentiality and security of the information they handle. Their choice of GroupWise as a messaging system makes the task easier, as the platform has always proved to be secure, reliable, and highly available.
Using GroupWise Shared Folders to Maintain Consistency and Records Security
Leveraging the GroupWise proxy capability, EWI uses GroupWise Shared Folders to manage all projects across the company’s 8 departments. Mitchell Givner, Operations Manager and in charge of IT at EWI, explains their approach: "We decided to work with GroupWise Shared Folders because this is an easy way to get everyone in the various departments working in a consistent manner without having to go through complex employee training. If they know how to use GroupWise, they know how to use Shared Folders."
The process is quite straightforward. Every department at EWI has a GroupWise Shared Folder named after it, such as, Contracts, Corporate Accounting, Marketing, Operations, HR, etc. The respective folder is a repository for all electronic documents pertinent to that department and has specific access rights assigned to it. These rights are correlated to the various GroupWise Groups, which are made up of the employees belonging to the different departments. Based on the group a specific employee falls in to, he or she is able to only view or perform other actions in the Shared Folder. In addition, confidential information is stored in departmental shared subfolders, where access is further restricted.
"Using this system has been quite successful for us," continues Givner. "People find it very easy to find the information and documents they need in the respective departmental folder. Using Shared Folders also makes it easier for everyone to track the progress of projects and the status of specific accounts. We also perform regular audits of the folders to ensure that the documents and correspondence is filed properly in the respective folders."
GWTreecast – A Great Time-Saving & Productivity-Enhancing Application
For 2 years now, the IT department at EWI has been using Treecast, now GWTreecast, to distribute the Shared Folders across the company. Before that, the whole process was done manually for every employee who joined the company or every time a new shared folder had to be added to the corporate GroupWise system.
Mitchell Givner recalls the nightmare, "It was terrible. Let’s say I had to create a Marketing folder containing 25 subfolders. All users would receive a notification for every single shared folder. They would not only have to accept each of the notifications, but they would have to recreate the correct structure for the shared folder and subfolders as GroupWise doesn’t do it for you. In fact, when something like this happened, we would have an administrative assistant proxy into each account, accept the shared folder notifications, and then recreate the respective Shared Folder tree. You can imagine how much time we spent just managing this process."
Givner decided to look for an application that could provide centralized creation, deployment, and management of Shared Folders directly into a user's mailbox. He came across Treecast featured at the time on Novell’s Cool Solutions site.
"Immediately, I deployed the application and redid my Shared Folders tree using Treecast. It’s such a time saver and thanks to it, the process of creating a new Shared Folder to be added to the corporate GroupWise has been streamlined significantly. Treecast is a great program and it really saves me a lot of time. Every employee gets the Shared Folder tree and all documents generated in their account and they don’t have to do anything. If they accidentally delete or modify it, Treecast automatically recreates the original structure. I would definitely recommend it to any organization that like EWI relies on GroupWise Shared Folders and needs automated centralized management of their creation, modification, and deletion. I am also looking forward to the new features in the next release of GWTreecast scheduled for later this year," concludes Givner.
