Santa's Best
Simplifying GroupWise Folder Management
GWTreecast from Messaging Architects provides simplified folder management and enhanced employee productivity at Santa's Best
Executive Summary
With a product protfolio of over 3000 products, Santa's Best is the largest US supplier of Christmas decorations and accessories. The company has several US branches and an overseas office in Hong Kong. They rely on Novell GroupWise for collaboration, leveraging the GroupWise Shared Folders capability to ensure that employees across departments have secure access to thousands of customer accounts and millions of messages found in the corporate system’s message store. To manage the GroupWise Shared Folders centrally, they use Treecast, an application that integrates with eDirectory and allows the building of GroupWise Shared Folders without end-user intervention. The solutions saves the IT department and product designers an enormous amount of time and effort.
Background
Headquartered in Northfield, IL, Santa's Best is the largest supplier of Christmas decorations and accessories. The company manufactures over 3000 products; every year, there are new designs and concepts put into production. The company's commitment to excellence is reflected in the fact that for over 100 years their products find their way in millions of homes and are carried by major retail stores, such as Sears, Walgreens, Walmart, and many others. The company has several branches in the US, as well as an overseas office in Hong Kong. They rely on Novell GroupWise for collaboration, leveraging the GroupWise Shared Folders capability to ensure that employees across departments have secure access to the thousands of customer accounts and millions of messages that can be found in the corporate collaboration system's message store.
Using GroupWise Shared Folders to Manage the Multitude of Projects at Santa's Best
At Santa's Best, business is run through GroupWise Shared Folders. While employees have access to personal folders, all correspondence pertaining to specific projects is kept in shared folders accessible to all employees for timely team-tagging and follow-up.
Bill O'Gara, IT manager at Santa's Best, tells how they started using GroupWise Shared Folders: "It was almost accidental. In the early days when the company was much smaller, some users had data they shared with others through GroupWise Shared Folders. When the time came to archive the information in these accounts, we realized GroupWise did not support shared folders in the archive. While we were exploring ways to make the archived information available to users, we also started looking for a more streamlined way to centrally manage GroupWise Shared Folders and use it as a collaboration strategy."
Eventually, the company implemented the GroupWise Shared Folders capabilities to manage all vendor accounts and product design projects across the company's departments. The Shared Folder trees are broken down based on calendar year. Unfortunately, GroupWise doesn't have a very good way of automatically accepting Shared Folders and recreating the tree hierarchy, so O'Gara started looking for a third-party application to solve their problem. He realized that there weren't that many products for GroupWise folder manipulation on the market. Fortunately, he came across Treecast, which addressed all his requirements for centralized shared folder manipulation.
Treecast is a Shared Folders management solution for GroupWise which was recently acquired by Messaging Architects. Treecast 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.
"GWTreecast: A Simple and Elegant Solution to Collaboration"
Dorothy Schweigert is the Treecast administrator at Santa's Best. She isn't part of IT, but belongs to the Product Planning department. "I am a very non-technical person, but that doesn't stop me from successfully being able to work with Treecast. This application is very easy to use, especially when we consider the alternative – manually accepting every notification for a shared folder, going through the GroupWise wizard and then recreating the exact tree structure for every share. Given the huge number of accounts and product development projects we work on every year, this would represent hours of wasted time and lost productivity."
Both O'Gara and Schweigert concur that Treecast has added value to their GroupWise collaboration system, enhancing their ability to run business efficiently. Schweigert adds, "It's nice to be able to manage everything quickly and easily and simplify the work of the end users, who are thus able to focus on their business goals. The fact that Treecast also has the option of recovering accidentally deleted folder trees is a very nice safeguard that luckily we haven't had the chance to test yet, but we are certainly glad to have it."
"I am extremely happy with Treecast, support has always been outstanding, and I will definitely recommend this product for any organization that needs to manage GroupWise folders without having to dedicate a lot of IT resources or overhead. Treecast offers a simple and elegant solution for our collaboration needs," concludes O'Gara.
