Use Case: Lotus Foundations in a small business

Scenario

• Small business with between 5 and 100 Information Workers (i.e. staff who use a computer on a daily basis as part of their work)
• Business has its own internet domain and ADSL or better broadband Internet connection
• Business has the following types of Information Workers:
  • office based staff (sales, marketing, administration);
  • roaming users who occasionally work out of the office (execs, managers);
  • mobile users who usually work out of the office (home workers, sales).
• Business has following IT needs:
  • email for individuals, groups of individuals and "virtual users" (e.g. "sales", "support")
  • individual and shared calendars
  • individual and shared task lists
  • Manager/Secretary relationships whereby secretary has controlled access to Inbox and Calendar of Manager
  • Personal and shared folders to hold business documents
  • Remote access to personal and shared folders from outside of the office
  • Hosting of company website
  • Management of content on company website

This is not an untypical scenario for present day small-ish companies who are striving to use IT to improve their businesses.

In addition to the functional requirements outlined above, the typical company will also have the following objectives:

• A desire to have the minimum of "boxes"
• A desire for those boxes to be located in a normal office whilst remaining secure and inobtrusive
• A desire for a cost-effective solution that requires the minimum of external consultancy support and no need for internal IT resources to maintain or administer it.
• All costs to be transparent: both initial capital and recurring costs.

The Benefits of Lotus Foundations

Whilst there are a number of off-the-shelf solutions that meet some or most of these requirements, only one meets them all; and that is Lotus Foundations.

As detailed elsewhere on this website, Lotus Foundations is a family of self managing servers that are optimised for the needs of small and medium businesses. The primary benefits of Lotus Foundations over the opposition are:

• Extremely short installation and commissioning times. It is not unusual for a new server to be installed and running in under an hour; even when the server has been shipped to a remote site with no local IT support.
• Fast Disaster Recovery in the event of data loss because the server backs automatically on a regular basis (as often as every 15 mins if the customer so desires)
• Low entry and recurring costs because many additional "hidden" costs are removed: like the need for expensive Microsoft Office licenses.
• Upgrades are provided on a regular basis and require little IT expertise to apply: the need for patch management is removed.
• Autonomic server management monitors the server continually and corrects detected configuration problems automatically.
• Remote support is the norm, allowing the small amount of support to be out-sourced with ease: freeing the business to concentrate on its core activities.
• Extremely secure environment at all times. Built on a Linux core with award winning Lotus Notes and IBM's Autonomic Computing delivering 24 our protection from viruses, intrusion attacks and other malware.