SWING into a Centralized Document Management System

Today, a major challenge faced by many companies is the limitation in integrating all their information into a centralized document management system. This alike, was a major concern for AS Anlegg (www.asanlegg.no), a Norway constructing company. AS Anlegg have projects ranging from building houses, office buildings, hotels, roads and bridges, and while located in Trondheim, Norway, they run construction projects from Kirkenes in North to Oslo in South Norway. The total sale per year is estimated to exceed 1.1 billion NOK.

AS Anlegg utilizes Lotus Notes as their document management system. Today, the company runs 150 different projects on their Lotus Domino servers, which is served by IBM eServer.

The secret is integration!

Jan-Eirik Nilsskog, Civil Engineer at AS Anlegg, decided he wanted to use Lotus Notes as their document management system. This decision arose once AS Anlegg joined forces with Harald Arne Hammer, a consultant for ConCrea (www.concrea.no/), who helped out in the development and implementation of the solution.

Therefore Jan-Eirik Nilsskog in conjunction with Harald Arne Hammer, worked together to develop a solution that would work with Microsoft Office and all other applications (i.e: MS Project, Autocad, images, etc). AS Anlegg in 2000 decided to invest in IT Factory business suite, making IT Factory and Lotus Notes AS Anlegg groupware. At the time, they were running an IBM AS/400 application. 

AS Anlegg have district offices in Kirkenes, Bodoe, Trodheim and Oslo, while at the same time conduct around 20 projects outside the office, all which run their system via a Citrix Metaframe and consist of a team of 300 Notes users. With all this in place, AS Anlegg's goal was to have a centralized document management system, whereby all information could be located in one place.

SWING Integrator for Notes & Office has provided AS Anlegg with the opportunity to integrate their Lotus Notes applications running on their AS/400 server, with MS Office in a flexible, fast and efficient manner. SWING Integrator allows employees to access documents, launch applications remotely and edit their document findings. It helps employees easily locate documents and control the access to each document.

Key technologies

During development stages, AS Anlegg began experiencing many difficulties within their in house system. To help solve the problem, they began searching for a tool that would help them to integrate MS Office, MS Project, and Autocad within their Lotus Notes and IT Factory framework, and a Citrix Metaframe server.

Due to the critical urgency, countless hours had been spent searching the Internet after a solution. After evaluating several solutions, as noted by Jan-Eirik Nilsskog: "The SWING Integrator was definitely the only solution that could easily be integrated with IT Factory and help us out of our problems". With the help of Harald Arne Hammer from Concrea, SWING Integrator was bought and installed in 2001. As stated by Jan-Eirik "the rest is a success story".

The SWING Integrator was definitely the only solution that could easily be integrated with IT Factory and help us out of our problems. - Jan-Eirik Nilsskog

 
SWING Integrator has provided AS Anlegg with an exceptionally flexible solution, making it possible to work with numerous projects and thousands of documents. At the start of each project, employees are submitted with two databases. The databases are named Korrespondanse (letters) and the other Produksjon (drawings, pictures, quality control, etc.). Here, once a document is created, it firstly cannot be deleted and secondly each document receives its own ID number, therefore adding to the ease of searching up a document. Stated by Jan-Eirik Nilsskog: "We can now view drawings and office files, along with easily connecting documents to every employee in AS Anlegg. Also, security is fully supported.". Today, AS Anlegg have 100 projects running SWING Integrator. 

By integrating SWING Integrator into their application and system, employees are no longer required to travel out to every project in order to set up a server. Instead, a phone line and a thin Citrix client is needed to be set up and 'Voila' everything is set up and ready to go! 

"I am working on a project 450 km North of our main office, but I feel like I am still sitting in our main office using our network" notes Jan-Eirik Nilsskog. SWING Integrator is a solution that makes integration with Office work well, while simultaneously helping to make administration both easier and cheaper, in turn saving time and money for AS Anlegg. Jan-Eirik concludes "All our active projects can now be run by Lotus Notes and SWING".

Back to Stories