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With 57 stores nationwide, Office World* stocks all the best brands for office supplies, stationary, business equipment, furniture for home and office, as well as supplying essential business services like printing and copying. Improved communications, better customer service and reduced costs are all the result of introducing new applications including workflow, email and collaboration tools running in a robust and reliable wide area Novell environment.
The Problem
Relocating key functions including IT from Reading to new larger premises in Milton Keynes, implementing SAP* and dealing with the impending Year 2000, were some of the challenges facing Office World two years ago. In addition, eight members of the IT team decided not to make the move leaving a testing situation for recently appointed IT manager Robert Nicholson.
"It was a great opportunity to understand exactly what was going on with our systems and redefine the IT strategy to meet the changing needs of the business," explains Nicholson. "What we discovered was that the desktop side really was in disarray - it had grown up like so many systems piecemeal. At head office there was a mixture of operating systems from DOS, to various flavours of Windows* from version 3 to NT."
Assessing the Options
Nicholson and his growing team discovered a large number of Novell® NetWare® 4 SFT3 servers, all of which had managed to lose their mirrored pairs, rendering the added resilience ineffective. "We took a deep breath and decided the only thing to do was plan for a total migration and consolidation exercise," recalls Nicholson. "We wanted to run an IP environment, improve management and reduce the support implications as well as offer more and better services to our users."
Creating A Platform for Growth
Following a hectic period of activity, during which over 200 PCs with a standard Windows desktop were rolled out in two locations and multiple servers were consolidated onto new larger machines running NetWare 5, Office World achieved the stable platform it needed to deliver its IT. "It was a busy eight months, but it enabled us to establish a supportable base from which to build and deliver our IT services to our users," says Nicholson.
Changes to the infrastructure were inevitable, the basic firewall services were deemed outdated, so Novell BorderManager Enterprise Edition became the standard. Implementing BorderManager gave the team more control over access to its systems, including the wide area connections to its 58 stores located across the UK and the central warehouse system running on the AS400* server. "Previously, everybody was simply connected to the network, and potentially they could see all of the systems. Now we channel them through BorderManager, which allows us to manage traffic flows while giving users controlled access to all of the systems and applications that they need. It makes for less congestion on the network and a better, faster service for our users."
Office World has always encouraged links to and from its partners and suppliers, for example Lex Transfleet*, which operates the fleet of Office World lorries, has a direct link between its own AS400 server and Office World to exchange logistical information. "Moving these links under the control of BorderManager gave us much better visibility of what was happening," says Nicholson. "Plus we can easily manage the levels of access to our systems, giving us more security and our partners a better service."
Increasingly key staff were using notebook computers and these too became part of the standard supported offering. "Novell ZENworks® for Desktops 2 was used to deliver the applications to the desktops and notebooks. It was a great leap forward, but if ZENworks 3 - the version we have now - had been available at the time it would have made the job so much easier," recalls Nicholson. "BorderManager also gave us the virtual private network (VPN) ability to support these roving, remote users in a more productive manner."
GroupWise for All
As part of the central migration, Novell GroupWise® was adopted as the email, scheduling and collaboration application. "As a tool, the email client in GroupWise is a lot better than the alternative Microsoft* offerings. A significant advantage is that we haven't experienced the traumas of the Outlook viruses that have been doing the rounds, and that has been a positive benefit," says Nicholson. "We use our calendaring intensively - everything from meeting rooms to projectors and other shared resources are on there."
Last year it was decided to extend email facilities out to the 58 stores. In addition, reducing the amount of paperwork and forms that were being sent between the stores and central offices became a target. "Forms and workflow are definitely the order of the day here," explains Nicholson. "The solution we are implementing uses Metastorm's e-works*, running on an NT box managed by Novell eDirectory, as it depends on a Microsoft SQL engine. Forms are the bane of our life - whenever you need to do anything a form has to be filled in. If the roof at a store leaks, then you filled in a form and faxed it to the property people for authorisation." e-works will automate the process, capture the information and best of all gives the stores feedback on progress.
As the retail stores were going to have to use browsers to access the workflow and forms application, it was decided to offer them email facilities through a web interface too using the web version of GroupWise. "Email, forms and workflow speeds up our processes, saves money and saves trees as well," comments Nicholson. "There is now much more feedback, better information flows, loops are closed and everybody feels more involved."
Future
Plans are already underway for a major investment in the stores with new point of sales systems and a migration of local servers to NetWare 5. "This is part of our IP strategy," explains Nicholson. "We will be implementing new PC based tills." Network connections are also being upgraded through the rollout of a new Cisco* ISDN based network. Following this upgrade, Office World plans to make more and better use of its intranet.
One of the big improvements planned is to extend the range of goods offered at each store by using the intranet to display an extended catalogue of products that are available directly from its central warehouse. "We currently deliver office furniture within two to five days, but the intranet will allow us to give customers much better information on exactly when the furniture will arrive," says Nicholson. "Today the stores get four hourly updates, the intranet will always be on and therefore they will be able to do real-time stock checks and allocation of product." The intranet will also allow stores to query stock levels held at other stores, so customers can either be directed to visit another store nearby or have goods allocated from an alternative location.
Customer Value
For Office World moving to a consolidated Novell environment has allowed it to deliver significantly more and better services to its users, with no additional support implications. "Management has got easier," says Nicholson. "We install the desktops using ZENworks and we use the workstation remote control facility in ZENworks for managing our desktops remotely. This is exceedingly useful given the number of sites that we support. If a machine falls over, we don't spend hours trying to work out what happened, what keys the user pressed - we simply rebuild the image and have it back up and working in under half an hour."
Users are happier too, they have email, forms, workflow and collaboration tools that make their jobs easier and a robust network offering them significant increase in functionality, applications and information.
Nicholson sums up his system saying, "GroupWise and ZENworks - you forget what it's like not to have them."
Office World has been assisted in building its Novell environment by installation and consulting partners, Telamon Systems*.
Novell, NetWare, GroupWise and ZENworks are registered trademarks and BorderManager and eDirectory are trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the US and other countries. * All third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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