Canton of Thurgau

Success Story

Swiss Canton of Thurgau chooses open standards, migrating 2,000 users to Novell® GroupWise® running on Linux*

Overview

The Swiss county of Thurgau, situated on the southern shore of Lake Constance, is home to almost a quarter of a million people. The administration of the county is responsible for several services in 70 municipalities, which together cover an area of almost 1,000 square kilometers.

Challenge

The County of Thurgau had been running three proprietary e-mail systems - the e-mail environment used by the 70 municipalities, a Microsoft* Exchange server for the central county administration and Linkworks Mail. The county wanted to facilitate collaborative working by replacing these systems with a centralized email system that would improve performance and reliability across the multiple platforms used by the various bodies involved. Another fundamental consideration was that the system chosen should reflect the county's overall IT objective of moving to open standards.

Novell solution

"Novell GroupWise for Linux is essentially an IT benefit for our users, but one that will allow us to achieve a quantum leap in internal and external county communication because of its excellent integration with connected systems."

Laurenz Räber
Project Manager
IT Department
Canton of Thurgau

The county researched alternatives for a new open source email solution and found that Novell® GroupWise® for Linux was the only product that met all its requirements.

"GroupWise for Linux includes all the functionality we need to ensure cooperation within the county, particularly with our remote users," said Laurenz Räber, Project Manager at the County of Thurgau. "Our remote users can now access their e-mail or make requests for office resources via a standard Web browser."

In all, the county is migrating 2,000 users to Novell GroupWise for Linux, making it one of the first counties in Switzerland to move to an open email system. Users now enjoy the convenience of accessing e-mail from whatever their preferred device: desktop, laptop, cell phone or PDA.

Scheduling and address management systems have similarly been made more accessible. Because the system is based on open standards, employees are able to work flexibly across all the systems and departments involved in the administrative process.

The decision in favor of Novell and open source has delivered a further advantage to the Canton of Thurgau. Many of the eGovernment processes involving citizens and local government offices depend on clear and secure identification of those involved and their classification by role and responsibility. Novell eDirectory™ is providing the county with the necessary high standards of secure identity management, with the central user management system enabling synchronization of the directories of all connected systems.

Results

The employees of the central Thurgau administrative office and the municipalities can now work together more easily and productively in spite of their disparate IT environments.

"Our Linux-based Novell solutions offer the stability and reliability we need, as well as the openness we require in our heterogeneous environment," said Räber. "Novell is helping us to adhere to our centralized and server-based IT strategy and, looking to the future, has helped to put objectives such as single sign-on and access to external resources via LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) within our grasp."

Novell and GroupWise are registered trademarks and eDirectory is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. * Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.