About Almabani General Contractors
Based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Almabani General Contractors is one of the region's leading construction firms. Over its 37-year history, Almabani has successfully managed a broad range of construction projects, from high-rise buildings, hospitals and bridges to road networks and airports. The company employs over 5,000 people, working at sites across Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
Challenge
Almabani has a large mobile workforce based at temporary construction sites rather than permanent office locations. The company needs to offer remote working capabilities and enable project managers anywhere in the region to exchange information easily and reliably. As a result, the IT team has created a complex wide area network involving satellite, Internet and wireless connections, as well as more traditional leased-line connections.
"Where we have to operate using the satellite link, data transfer is much slower, and this would cause synchronisation problems for most e-mail servers," said John Lincoln, IT Director at Almabani. "We needed a solution that could reliably provide access to e-mail, calendaring, tasks and files from any of our locations."
Almabani also wanted to provide Web access to these collaboration tools, and enable synchronisation with PDAs and mobile devices. The challenge was to deploy a solution that was both flexible and resilient enough to operate effectively in these demanding conditions.
Novell Solution
Almabani chose to implement Novell GroupWise, running on Novell Open Enterprise Server.
"We have Novell GroupWise Post Offices running on servers at nearly all our project sites, linked in various ways to central systems at our head office in Jeddah," said Lincoln. "The caching and synchronisation features in Novell GroupWise significantly reduce the amount of network traffic, reducing the load on the slower satellite links and allowing users to access their e-mail almost instantly from any of our remote locations."
More recently, Almabani decided to upgrade to a new version of Novell GroupWise, to take advantage of some important new functionality.
"One great thing about the latest version of Novell GroupWise is the improved calendaring features," said Lincoln. "Users can subscribe to a number of different calendars, which are then updated dynamically—so there is no need to keep importing calendar information to keep up to date. They can also publish their own calendars, allowing external contacts to see when they are free or busy, making it easier to set up meetings."
Another benefit is the flexibility of the Novell GroupWise back-end, which can be accessed via the standard client, a Web access view, or even third-party e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook.
"Our users are free to use Outlook on their PCs if they want, but nobody does—everyone prefers the Novell user interface," said Lincoln. "However, some of our employees have Windows-based smartphones and PDAs, and it is a big advantage that they can collect Novell GroupWise e-mail on them. Synchronising contacts between Novell GroupWise and Outlook is much easier now too."
Almabani has also been impressed with the reliability of the new version of Novell GroupWise.
"I was actually involved in the beta programme for this release, and it was immediately clear that Novell had done an excellent job," said Lincoln. "We hardly found any bugs in the beta version, and the commercial release is practically bullet-proof."
Looking to the future, Almabani is planning to move its Novell GroupWise environment onto SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, and increase its use of Novell Teaming + Conferencing software.
Results
For Almabani, Novell GroupWise provides a stable and flexible e-mail platform that is capable of delivering excellent performance across the company's extended wide area network infrastructure. New features in the latest release of the software have enhanced the user experience and enabled users to increase their productivity significantly.
"E-mail solutions may not seem like an exciting or controversial area of IT, but they are the bed-rock of most businesses," said Lincoln. "The majority of our day-to-day business is conducted using e-mail, calendaring and other collaboration features provided by Novell GroupWise, so even small user interface improvements can deliver enormous gains in productivity."
By providing reliable e-mail and collaboration services to 550 users scattered across numerous project sites in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, Novell GroupWise is the engine that drives Almabani's business.
"Above all, it is the ability of Novell GroupWise to cope with our complex network infrastructure that sets it apart from other solutions," said Lincoln. "Most of the other options really require fast, reliable networks to function effectively; Novell GroupWise gives us the ability to communicate with project sites using satellite links in places where a traditional network link simply wouldn't be practical."