As we say goodbye to our bags at the check-in counter of any major airline, many of us say a silent prayer hoping that we’ll see them again on the luggage carousel at our destination airport.

But while lost baggage was relatively commonplace in the early days of air travel, today baggage routing and sorting is a fine art – with a low failure rate – thanks in large part to the software and mechanical integration solutions delivered by companies like Glidepath.

Founded in New Zealand in 1972, Glidepath is a leader in the field of airport baggage handling and sorting systems. To date the company has completed over 350 projects in more than 30 countries, ranging from small manual systems to large fully automatic software-driven sortation solutions.

The challenge
As its business has grown, Glidepath has expanded its operation – opening offices in countries as diverse as North America, Australia and Latin America. Given the different time zones it works in, Glidepath has had to adopt a seven-day-a-week 24/7 philosophy to business communications – a philosophy it found its legacy mail solution was unable to deliver on, as IT manager Ray Welburn explains.

“We had been running Microsoft Exchange 5.5 for a number of years,” he says, “but after opening offices in Canada, Argentina and the US, we began experiencing all sorts of problems with message routing between the offices.” The branches were connected by a Virtual Private Network (VPN), Welburn says, but the inconsistency of its lines and servers meant Glidepath suffered from frequent message corruption.

“We’d have messages being lost, stuck or unable to be sent,” he says, “and this was seriously impacting the company.” With multi-million dollar tender documents wholly dependent on timely email delivery, Welburn says Glidepath needed to install an “enterprise durable” solution.

A fail-safe approach
The company approached Auckland based knowledge management specialists Wadzi for some options. Wadzi’s Vaughan Rivett says after evaluating Glidepath’s requirements he suggested a two server ‘fail-safe’ solution for the company’s offices. One machine would run Lotus Domino Server on a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server, while another would run Lotus Notes and Domino on a Linux server.

If one server was to fail in any way, mail systems would automatically default to the second – meaning crash free communications for Glidepath. Welburn was impressed with the idea, but says he was concerned about whether or not Linux was enterprise ready. “Because our mail system is so mission critical,” he says, “we actually got Datacom to come in and independently verify that the Lotus Notes, Domino and Linux solution was a sensible option for us.”

As part of that process, two servers were set up and testing began. Welburn says the results were unexpected and completely changed the way Glidepath were to approach their mail server overhaul.

“One of the problems with Microsoft Exchange,” he explains, “is that it is constantly being attacked by viruses and I found it difficult to keep it secure – particularly the web side of it, because Microsoft Internet Information Server provides web access to people’s mail. So our initial idea was to set up the two servers on different operating systems, and if one was attacked by a virus, the other one would still be operational. But what we found during the testing was that nothing ever attacked the Linux server anyway, so we decided to drop Windows altogether and have both servers running the Lotus Notes, Domino and Linux combination.”

Return on investment
To keep implementation costs low, Wadzi staff trained Glidepath IT personnel in how to set up the first server combination – and the company was then able to send its own people to each of its international offices to recreate the setup. “We built some tools to assist them with migrating their offices to the new solution,” says Rivett, “and we gave them a procedure to follow. From that they had no problems in bringing their various offices online.”

Today, the new server structure is delivering Glidepath numerous benefits. “It has performed far beyond expectations,” says Rivett. “Glidepath were spending lots of money on IT resource trying to keep their old system going, but now those maintenance costs have been significantly reduced – and moving to Lotus Notes, Domino and Linux means they’re also saving thousands of dollars in not requiring any Windows Server licenses.”

For Welburn, the new system is also delivering unexpected functionality benefits. “At install time,” he says, “we didn’t fully appreciate what Lotus Notes was capable of. What we wanted was a robust mail solution but now we’ve been able to bring our web site into Notes because Lotus Notes is a web server as well – and you can do all kinds of dynamic updates to the web site just by manipulating the Lotus Notes databases.”

Once assigned a certain level of security access, staff can now update their own sections of the Glidepath web site, says Welburn, and offshore team members (and clients) can also access engineering documents via Lotus Notes.

“99 percent of our jobs are overseas,” he says, “but with Notes we’re able to put a library of architectural drawings into a Lotus Database and people can access them from the web – all they need is a web browser to download them wherever they are – it’s much easier to manage than an FTP site. To do all these things using other software would have meant buying a host of other products, but with Lotus Notes you have one product that does the whole thing.”

For more information
www.glidepath.co.nz

IBM:
Duncan Richards
www.ibm.co.nz

Wadzi:
Vaughn Rivett
www.wadzi.biz

September 2004