Egemin

Success Story

Novell exteNd and Security and Identity Solution help travelling Egemin employees be more productive with secure, remote access to a personalized portal

Overview

Egemin (http://www.egemin.com) is a leading provider of advanced automation solutions for the food, pharmaceutical, warehousing and bulk liquid storage and distribution industries. Apart from its Belgian headquarters in Zwijndrecht (Antwerp), Egemin has offices all over Europe and the U.S., offering reliable international support with a highly skilled team of specialists. Egemin has nearly 700 employees, almost half of which are top-level engineers and developers.

Challenge

More than a third of Egemin's employees work outside the office and need remote access to files stored on the company's central servers. In the past, employees would dial in with a simple modem connection, but the data volume soon became too large and the information too sensitive for a slow, insecure link.

In addition, an increasing number of customers have requested remote access to improve cooperation on their projects. Egemin wanted to create a corporate portal to give both employees and customers secure access to information at any time, and from any machine.

Novell solution

"We evaluated a variety of solutions and after long and careful consideration, we decided to go for a solution built around Novell iChain. Novell iChain was simply the best product - and the easiest to implement."

Gert Vanden Bergh
ICT Systems Manager
Egemin

Egemin selected Novell exteNd to build its corporate portal and a Novell Security and Identity Solution, including Novell eDirectory, Novell DirXML and Novell iChain, to provide a secure identity management foundation.

"We evaluated a variety of solutions and after long and careful consideration, we decided to go for a solution built around Novell iChain," said Gert Vanden Bergh, ICT Systems Manager at Egemin. "Novell iChain was simply the best product - and the easiest to implement."

To implement a secure portal solution, Egemin relied on 4all NetWorks (http://www.4all.be), a Novell Business Expert Partner in Belgium and long-time consulting partner. The team used Novell exteNd to create a portal for its applications, all of which run on central servers at Egemin's headquarters.

Novell eDirectory provides a central repository for user information to authenticate users based on identity. Novell iChain provides a secure front-end for portal applications, ensuring that the right people have access to the right information. Egemin uses iChain to enforce strong authentication without having to make any changes to back-end applications, reducing both implementation time and costs.

"One of the unique features of this implementation is that we have also applied the secure identity management concept to Citrix* as well," said 4all NetWorks founder Patrick Coomans. "It means that you can not initiate a Citrix session, even directly, without going through the authentication process on iChain. It wasn't a big thing, really, but now all of our customers want the same authentication for their Citrix implementations."

Now both employees and customers sign on to the portal with a single ID and password and receive personalized views of information based on their identity. Users can access the portal at any time and from any machine using a standard Web browser.

"Through the portal, employees can access all the information they need, securely controlled by iChain or Citrix for non-Web enabled applications," said Coomans. "The same portal also provides room for communities and discussion forums, which is highly appreciated by customers."

Novell Cluster Services ensures high availability of Egemin servers, ensuring that employees can access the portal 24/7 from anywhere in the world. Of the company's travelling employees, there is an average of two dozen simultaneous users.

"To do their jobs properly, our employees need instant remote access to all the latest data, wherever they are," said Vanden Bergh. "And believe me, users do expect the system to be up and running all the time. The only disadvantage to the new portal is that employees and customers are getting spoiled and are constantly asking for more."

"Novell was an obvious choice for us," continued Vanden Bergh. "There is little or no competition for iChain, and all the other Novell products like NetWare and GroupWise are so easy to integrate with existing applications. The whole implementation went smoothly right from the beginning. Training was almost non-existent and our users are extremely happy about having a single sign-on."

Results

With a new corporate portal, Egemin users are more productive while travelling or working from other offices with secure, remote access to corporate applications. Novell Security and Identity Solution gives users personalized access to information, based on identity, which improves productivity and safeguards corporate security.

"We've had lots of positive feedback from the users, including our executives who see this solution as a technological showcase for Egemin," said Vanden Bergh. "Of course, we are well aware that this is a never-ending project and we will always keep on adding features to the portal and offer new services, both for our employees and our customers. But that's the beauty of Novell's solutions - they are infinitely scalable."