Trico Products

Success Story

Problems with Microsoft Exchange* 5.5 were taxing the UK office of Trico Products, making it difficult for users to communicate with other offices worldwide. Moving to Novell® GroupWise® brought greater reliability by eliminating downtime and now one person can easily administer the entire office.

Overview

Trico Products is a worldwide leader in the development and manufacture of integrated wiper systems and electronics, supplying products to more than 67 countries. The company is part of Tomkins PLC, an $8.5 billion organization with 67,000 employees. Trico Products has 6,000 employees across 10 locations worldwide.

Challenge

With offices throughout the world, Trico Products relies heavily on e-mail to communicate across time zones. The company's UK office was using Microsoft Exchange 5.5 and was struggling with reliability and experiencing frequent downtime. Tracking the delivery of e-mail was also difficult.

The UK office was also concerned about viruses and scripts. In one case, a user clicked on a URL that took down the office's entire Exchange post office. Maintenance was simply proving too time-consuming for the small IT staff.

Novell solution

"We are a global company, but have a small IT team and operate in a highly competitive market. We are always looking for products that reduce our workload and worries. Novell products reduce our overall IT costs, as well as the time spent on administration. They just work."

Cesar Mercado
IS Infrastructure Manager
Trico Products

While the majority of Trico Products offices had standardized on Novell GroupWise after evaluating Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes*, its UK office was still running Exchange as the result of an acquisition. Trico Products decided to migrate the office to GroupWise to improve reliability and eliminate administration headaches.

"With one IT person in our UK office, we simply didn't have the resources to handle the administration required by Exchange," said Cesar Mercado, IS Infrastructure Manager at Trico Products. "We've already experienced the efficiency of Novell GroupWise in our other offices which helps our small IT staff manage nearly 1,100 users worldwide."

The IT team set up a test environment in the U.S. and then completed the actual migration at its UK office in about 10 hours. Using a Novell migration utility, the team completed a successful overnight migration without losing any e-mail.

"The migration was easy and we had great support from Novell," said Mercado. "I used to get calls all the time about e-mail issues. Since the move to GroupWise, we haven't had a single complaint. In fact, we have had no e-mail issues at all."

Novell GroupWise has eliminated downtime with 99.999 percent uptime. Users now trust e-mail to effectively communicate with colleagues, which has also eliminated a significant amount of paperwork and faxing to international offices. Calendaring and scheduling across time zones has also improved collaboration for an international workforce.

"We do very little GroupWise administration other than adding new users," said Mercado. "We have one IT person in many of our locations to manage 200 or more users. That would not be the case with any other e-mail solution."

Mobile employees rely on GroupWise WebAccess to access e-mail while traveling or working in other locations. Because employees can access e-mail using any standard Web browser, the company can save money by reducing the number of VPN accounts it requires.

Many executives have remote access to GroupWise e-mail using PDA devices such as a BlackBerry*. The company is also implementing GroupWise Messenger to provide secure instant messaging, as well as the benefit of knowing when employees are online.

"We recently deployed GroupWise in our new China location," said Mercado. "It's a solid product and runs without issues in both our Microsoft Windows* and NetWare® environments. The cross-platform capability of GroupWise was another reason the product was appealing to us."

Trico Products is also using Novell ZENworks® to manage desktops in several of its offices. The company estimates that 25 percent of helpdesk calls are related to installing or reinstalling software and that ZENworks will help to significantly reduce software-related issues. The inventory and asset management capabilities of ZENworks will also reduce the weeks of travel and manual work required to manage its worldwide assets.

Results

"We do very little GroupWise administration other than adding new users. We have one IT person in many of our locations to manage 200 or more users. That would not be the case with any other e-mail solution."

Cesar Mercado
IS Infrastructure Manager
Trico Products

Novell GroupWise helps a small IT staff at Trico Products provide reliable e-mail for employees in both its Windows and NetWare environments. The company has eliminated downtime and has also significantly reduced administration time with one IT person in each office able to manage 200 users. The company estimates that GroupWise paid for itself within just a few months.

Novell ZENworks will help the company manage its workstations, significantly reduce travel time and reduce helpdesk calls by at least 25 percent.

"We are a global company, but have a small IT team and operate in a highly competitive market," said Mercado. "We are always looking for products that reduce our workload and worries. Novell products reduce our overall IT costs, as well as the time spent on administration. They just work."