The Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture wanted to improve and optimize its document management and collaboration capabilities.

Collaborating with external parties and maintaining the document management system was becoming burdensome.

The Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture depends on numerous distributed teams of people internal and external to the organization, working together on projects and documents.

Exchanging documents via email and maintaining the document management system was becoming a significant administrative burden. Some teams also rely on collaboration with external parties, such as representatives from governmental departments. The integration of these external people into document management workflows was limited to sending emails, which increased the workload for everybody.

The chamber looked for a solution to supplement its existing collaboration and document management processes, which would make sharing documents, tasks and keeping information updated easier.

The organization evaluated Vibe along with leading alternatives, and concluded that the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solution fit well into the existing IT environment and met all of its requirements. The solution runs on virtualized Open Enterprise Server instances in a multi-tier environment for high-availability, and it is tightly integrated with the chamber’s OpenText eDirectory and GroupWise solutions. The chamber plans to integrate OpenText Messenger as its corporate instant messaging solution to further speed up the information flow.

One of the first teams to use Vibe was the IT group working on software distribution and desktop management. This team now relies on Vibe for all of its task management.

“We use the comments feature in Vibe to organize our work,” said Frank Kluge, IT Manager at the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture. “It is much easier and faster to get an overview now. You simply click on a task and then you instantly see all the comments, including any information about who has already been working on that task and what they have done. This simplifies collaboration significantly.”

Interaction between users through comments instead of emails improves transparency and accelerates the information flow substantially. It also helps the chamber’s IT teams to build up a lasting knowledge base.

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