• Teamware Office™ offers exceptional possibilities for remote management.
• Simple to install.
• High number of confidential documents requires privacy.
• Generating real and measurable cost savings.

The Council of the European Union is a community institution at a European level, primarily acting as the law-making organ of the European Community. It deals with the coordination of the general economic policy of the member states, international agreements established between the European Community and other states or international organizations, and determines the budget for the European Community together with the European Parliament.

When the Council was formed in 1993, out of the merger of various institutions, there was an acute need for a software system that could manage the exchange of documents between and within the various organizations. Teamware (then a division of ICL) won the contract because Teamware Office™ offered exceptional possibilities for remote management.

The users and the admininistrators have been increasingly pleased with the unique capabilities of Teamware Office. For example, the product was simple to install both on the server and on the client computers. Alan McGrath, e-mail administrator at the European Council said, "No complex configuration work was required with this installation. You just have to click 'next', next' and 'next' again and 'that's it'; the installation is completed." Furthermore, the system is extremely stable and expandable. In the initial phase of the installation, there were some ten users and the expectation was to install a few hundred more. However, the Council is now up to 3200 users on the server and the system is running problem-free.

Because the system had been running smoothly, the Council of Europe decided to migrate from Teamware Office 3.5 to 5.1 in connection with the Council IT specialists' decision to implement a general system migration from a UNIX environment to Windows NT. Due to the special programs developed by Teamware technicians for this project, the migration was successful.

Two characteristics of Teamware Office that cannot be found in other groupware products are very much appreciated by the Council of the European Union. The first concerns privacy. During the transmission of a document, an encoding and decoding key is automatically sent with the communication so that only the recipient can read the message. Even system administrators who manage the transmission are unable to read the contents of the document. "This is of particularly great advantage," says Daniël Sprengers, "certainly in an environment such as that of the Council where the number of confidential documents is considerable." Teamware Office is often used by highly-placed security staff.

The second advantage of Teamware Office compared to other groupware products is that you can instantly see if a document has been read or not. For the Council, this is an important feature, in view of the fact that a large part of the work consists of the reading, modification and forwarding of documents. "The document stream is important within the Council of the European Union, and the software from Teamware enables us to see where a document may be blocked," clarifies Alan McGrath, "So Teamware Office has become a strategic tool in the determination of responsibility."

Teamware Office is of essence in generating real and measurable cost savings. For example, as told by Alan McGrath regarding the so-called 'summit meetings' where the leading members of the European Council meet, "Previously, there was a whole army of translators sent to these meetings to translate to and from each of the languages of the European Union. This required expensive flights and hotels for several nights. Now we only have to send a small team of technicians and coordinators with a few PC's and a router, so that the intranet at the meeting place can be extended. The translators can then - without leaving their home base - receive the documents to be translated via Teamware Office, translate them and send them back before the meeting finishes; consequently, considerable travel time and lodging expenses can be saved," explains McGrath.

The Council was positively surprised by another form of cost saving with Teamware Office as an e-mail platform. Daniël Sprengers explained, "The majority of viruses are written for the Microsoft environment. In practice, we have not yet encountered a virus in Teamware Office. Our colleagues in the European Commission, on the contrary, have had to shut down their server several times due to virus problems, resulting in considerable service costs and inefficiency with down times."

In summary, the users at the Council of the European Union are particularly satisfied with Teamware Office as a platform for e-mail and document exchange. They have full confidence in migrating to version 6.0 from the 5.3 version currently in use. The migration is planned to take place later during 2002. The advantages of the underlying architecture will be preserved and complemented with an intuitive and even more user-friendly web interface.