Allan Gray Limited, the largest privately owned investment management firm in SA, contracted Notes specialist Safmarine Computer Services, (SCS) to upgrade its Notes platform from Lotus Domino R5 to latest version Lotus Domino R6.
In the first major upgrades since 1999, Lotus Domino R6 offers a mix of features that not only lowers administrative efforts with its messaging platform but improving the experience of everyday users.
"Our Notes platform is critical to our business and given the Notes expertise SCS have within the Cape region, they were the obvious solutions provider. The upgrade was seamless and without disruption to our business," says IT Manager for Allan Gray Limited, Craig Sales.
The benefits of upgrading are plentiful, its the reliability, scalability, inter-operability and enhanced administration and performance power of the Domino 6 server which can make managing the complexities of a business easier and more cost-effective. The server allows for better administrative control with tools like policies, archiving, quota management and spam filtering.
"There are too many gaps that Exchange just wouldn't be able to fill," says Sales on the reasoning for opting for Notes. "We don't only use the Notes platform for mail, we use it for just about everything, for offline capabilities, data replication, HR functions, disaster recovery and a wide variety of cataloguing, scheduling and calendaring activities."
SCS infrastructure project manager, Frans Lombard says the main obstacle was to change the Domino backend to R6 without disrupting the productivity of the user base. "We managed this by doing the upgrade after hours and by ensuring that our procedures were tried and tested to ensure minimal downtime. SCS also made use of the Smart Upgrade feature to provide a seamless upgrade and phased project approach with checkpoints at all stages of the project."
Domino 6 provides a tightly integrated infrastructure, delivering an intelligent combination of capabilities through a single set of servers, and 40% of companies running Lotus Domino customise the mail template using the designer client.
"We are in a habit of always looking for bigger and better options, like more disk space or more bandwidth rather than using what we already have to its full capacity. Domino 6 enables users to reach this capacity with network compression and the single copy template function to name a few," says Lombard.
"Companies hoping to achieve a return on investment through integrated infrastructures solutions should look to Domino, particularly if they are developing or plan to develop in-house applications," concludes Lombard.
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