Histoires de réussite

When the city ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands decided to change the email addresses of their 2000 GroupWise® users, they knew they needed a way to automate the process. Otherwise, they were faced with the very labour-intensive task of entering all of the new addresses manually. 

So Paddy Verberne, R&D Specialist at the city of ’s-Hertogenbosch, contacted GWAVA to see if there was a chance to ease that process. And sure enough – thanks to Vertigo the dreaded task suddenly was a breeze! 

“I heard what Vertigo could do and it was a done deal - we bought it,” says Paddy Verberne. “I appreciate Vertigo more and more as a tool which could literally do anything – I still consider Vertigo to be the one and only tool for GroupWise that really is worth buying!” 

’s-Hertogenbosch has nearly 140,000 inhabitants. The municipality’s government offices are spread throughout the city at 25 different locations and are connected through single or redundant fibre optic systems. The city sets a high priority on security and as such, has two server rooms in different locations which are able to work independently to facilitate all ICT-related services. The servers also have a failover mechanism – just in case one of them breaks down. Once Vertigo was installed, it was just a matter of pointing it to a text file with the User ID and the new email address. Vertigo then made the entire switchover in less than 30 minutes! Without Vertigo, the IT department of the municipality would have had to spend almost a week of working days changing the addresses manually – not to mention the number of typing errors that could have crept in.  

After that job was done, Paddy Verberne had time to discover what else Vertigo can do. He now uses it regularly to see a complete overview of rights, to check for user errors and to locate stuck SOAP events which prevent smartphones from synchronizing. 

“Because of the new Vertigo feature our ROI was half an hour! Now I can use Vertigo to check for user errors with the nice table view or check for stuck SOAP events,” explains Paddy Verberne. 

The municipality’s servers are virtualized using VMware ESX and they currently support Novell OES2 Linux, Microsoft Windows®, SLES 10/11 and HP-UX. Their current GroupWise setup consists of a fully virtualized OES2-Linux and GroupWise 8.0.2 HP2 setup and two BlackBerry® Enterprise Server 4.1 servers with about 100 users. To be able to connect more types of mobile devices on GroupWise, they are planning to implement Novell Data Synchronizer.