Siemens Med Uses SWING to Integrate the Best of Both Worlds

Siemens Medical Solutions (Med) of Siemens AG is one of the largest suppliers of healthcare equipment in the world. Med is renowned for its innovative products, services and complete solutions, ranging from imaging systems for diagnosis and therapy equipment for treatment, to electromedicine and hearing instruments to IT solutions that optimize workflow and increase efficiency in hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices. Med employs approximately 30,000 people worldwide.

Lloyd Merithew, Project Manager at Siemens Medical Solutions USA, shared with us his experiences in implementing SWING Integrator for Notes & Office.

Why did you choose SWING Integrator?

- At Siemens Medical Solutions USA, we use Microsoft Office on all our laptops and desktop computers and Lotus Notes as our Groupware platform. Conforming to standards lowers our development, training and support costs. The majority of our user base is highly mobile while requiring reliable access to corporate information. We built our own CRM system based on Domino version 5 and have found it's an excellent platform due to replication features and speed to build/deploy, but Lotus Notes' greatest weakness is in reporting and sharing data with non-Notes users. 

Integrating the "Best of Both Worlds" - the power of Notes replication and the standard Office applications of Microsoft on the desktop, has solved both of these problems. We have written custom code to integrate Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook but have found that by using the SWING Integrator, development is faster and without long debugging cycles.

What are your plans for Domino Web applications?

- Because we found ourselves providing more services via the Web on our intranet, we decide to look at the beta of Version 3 of SWING Integrator. We were pleased to see that SWING has provided the same user experience and development ease whether for the Web or the Notes client. It's an excellent tool to provide users with the ability to work with Domino data in an application like Excel or Word without long development cycles, complicated coding or the need to install DLL's or other executables on the users PC.

How does SWING Software add value at Siemens Med?

- Lotus Notes Power Users can easily add new templates to add totally new functionality to a Notes application. For the programmer, just call the functions from the code libraries to add really cool features to the Domino application that MS Office users will really love to use. I found SWING's technical support to be very responsive. Also an important note is that the source code is available for purchase, which ensures the long-term ability to support your applications.

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