NMBS, Nationale Maatschappij der Belgische Spoorwegen, Belgium's national railway service is, with around 42,000 employees, one of the largest employers in the country. Moreover, it is a business with ten sites located across the country. An e-mail system for such an operation must therefore be extremely reliable and easy to manage. After extensive comparative testing, NMBS selected Teamware. Some five years later, they still do not regret that decision.
When it was decided, in 1996, to change over to a professional software product for e-mail and calendar functions that could support all users, it was also decided that the change should not take place overnight. Teamware Office was extensively tested over the course of a year and compared with Microsoft Exchange, the last remaining competitor. Following this lengthy test period, the findings of the end-users and the system managers were collected and compared. For both groups, Teamware was the best choice.
2 persons managing 20,000 mailboxes
Frank Blomme, who is responsible for e-mail administration within NMBS, explained why: "The ease of management is incomparable. We need no more than 2 people to manage a total of 20,000 mailboxes. Those mailboxes are located on 35 servers spread across the country. All of the servers can be managed centrally from headquarters. This would present serious problems with other e-mail systems."
For a business with so many dispersed sites, the database compression features of Teamware Office are also of great importance. Frank Blomme explained: "Teamware Office has the great advantage that the compressed data can be distributed over the network. Consequently, the network loading is considerably reduced. In some cases, we are talking about a reduction of network traffic by as much as 70 percent." In particular, due to the compression process, the data is encrypted and illegible even by the network managers, thus ensuring a high degree of confidentiality for the end-users.
Direct faxing from Word or Excel
All Teamware Office users benefit from the e-mail and calendar features. A particularly popular option with NMBS employees is the fax functionality. Not only can each user send faxes from their mailbox but also directly from Microsoft Word or Excel thanks to sound integration of both Microsoft packages with Teamware Office. Frank Blomme said: "This option is very useful. Our employees can fax documents without the loss of time or quality usually associated with the traditional process of printing and faxing manually."
It will very soon be possible for the end user to receive faxes in his/her mailbox. The user can also send and receive SMS messages to and from Proximus mobile phones - a very useful feature for the many employees who work continuously on the railway lines.
Few interventions - never a crash
In addition to the robustness of the system and the light loading of the network, there are other reasons for administrators to be pleased with Teamware Office. The directory structure with people and groups is highly developed. "Thanks to this structure, it is very easy to delegate and distribute rights to new users on the basis of their profile," declared Frank Blomme.
Another advantage is the fact that Teamware Office is entirely independent of the server management system ? nothing is entered in the registry. This makes it particularly simple to transfer the whole environment to another server, either to restore the mail database or to create a test environment. That is not to say that the Teamware Office system had required many restorations, as confirmed by Frank Blomme "In the five years that Teamware Office has been running on our machines, there has seldom been a need for any intervention and we have never had a crash." This certainly has an impact on the Teamware corporate image - invisible to all e-mail viruses and worms written for the Microsoft environment, Teamware clients remain much more protected.
Finally, Frank Blomme talked about the support provided by Teamware and their local partner, Prodata Systems: "There is still continuous contact with the Teamware staff and if support is needed, it is always available very rapidly. The Teamware people are also open to requests from the client. So, at our suggestion, in the next release there is a synchronisation possibility foreseen between Teamware Office and the iPAQ personal organizer."
Satisfaction and confidence in the future
It is, therefore, no surprise that NMBS is placing its trust in Teamware for the future. In the short term, a change over to Teamware Office 6.0 is planned, an upgrade that they are anticipating with satisfaction due to the improved user interface and the confidence that an upgrade of Teamware Office is always problem free.