Popular Kitchen Manufacturer Used panagenda MarvelClient to Maximize Its HCL Notes Client’s Transparency and Efficiency

IT Support Pain Points

Nolte Küchen, the most popular and largest kitchen manufacturer brand in Germany, was an early adopter of HCL Notes and Domino. Since 1997, it has embraced and quickly adopted the platform’s new features and functionality with each new release to deliver added value and capabilities for their employees.

However, maintaining and supporting the environment became increasingly complex over the years as client versions began to differ across the organization as employees elected to upgrade their client at different times. This caused support calls to IT to grow exponentially. They wanted to fix this by making the IT administrative tasks and client upgrade procedures smoother, more organized and standardized to address and fix issues before they arose, thereby reducing the number of support tickets.

Efficiencies in client upgrade processes is imperative because client software landscapes are constantly changing, making it an ongoing challenge for IT support team to keep pace with the upgrade cycles mandated by their software vendors. And, in order to keep the Notes environment running the latest and greatest version of the Notes client, it goes without saying that frequent client upgrades have been and continue to be necessary.

A Comprehensive Solution

With a dedicated corporate IT group supporting the strategic Notes/Domino environment, the management team at Nolte Küchen understood the value of investing in a full-featured, unified management solution for its Notes client deployments, to help IT with their day-to-day work. From the early days of supporting and administering the environment it was clear that help was needed, in the form of better tools, to make administrative tasks easier and more efficient.

In 2010, Nolte Küchen decided to augment the out-of-the-box admin tools that came with Notes/Domino by adding and deploying the MarvelClient (MC) solution from panagenda to better manage its Notes client installations. In the 10+ years that followed, the initial deployment of MC Nolte Küchen has performed eight client upgrades to keep pace with the release cycles. Each upgrade project was executed seamlessly and successfully with zero impact to employees. The most recent upgrade project took less than 8 weeks to complete, using a phased approach, which included a program to keep employees informed of upcoming changes.

In addition, during the Notes client upgrade operation MC’s self-healing capabilities reset any non-standard settings in each client that may have been inadvertently set to non-standard by the employee and enforces standard configurations for all clients in the organization. This has greatly reduced the volume of help desk calls related to inconsistent client configurations.

With years of experience, Nolte Küchen now views the MarvelClient, with its successful track record, as the most comprehensive management solution that has met its business needs head on and provided reliable and intelligent client administration.

Dr. Dirk Kirchhoff, the IT Director for Notes/Domino, cites MarvelClient as being the only integrated solution that could expertly handle all of Nolte Küchen’s management, administration, and upgrade automation needs.

Dr. Dirk Kirchhoff adds that, “With panagenda’s MarvelClient solution a Notes version upgrade for our entire organization now takes a fraction of the time, weeks instead of months, that it used to take.”

Business Value Benefits

Specific improvements to the client management system have resulted in:

• Reduced Help Desk Support Calls
  MarvelClient has enabled Nolte Küchen to reduce its support calls for Notes client issues by 90%, through automated and standardized installations.
   
• Standardized Client Deployments
  With the MarvelClient, self-healing functionality ensures minimal downtime by resetting the Notes client configurations and notes.ini settings automatically.
   
• Automated Client Upgrades
  Enterprise software deployments require regular upgrades as new functionality and enhancements become available. MarvelClient understands and addresses complexities related to differing endpoint operating systems, varying hardware processing speeds and automates the whole upgrade process, thereby minimizing downtime for employees.

In recent years, HCL Nomad has also been deployed for employees, giving teams an additional avenue to access pre-existing and new Domino apps from mobile phones and tablets. The anytime/anywhere access has been an amazing boost to productivity.

Future Plans

Moving forward, Nolte Küchen continues to look for ways to simplify the administration tasks for its IT group and improving productivity for its workforce. To assist with accurate monitoring and automated client upgrade processing for their HCL Notes deployments, the new MarvelClient capabilities will be installed in 2021. This will enable their IT administrators to proactively identify and remediate any client issues before they become a problem.