Our customers tell us they are impressed. A high-performance, highly available communication system is key to strengthening our cultural infrastructure . Clearly, if our Paris office can't share knowledge with headquarters in San Francisco, or our ports in Oakland and Singapore are out of touch, then we are dropping the ball in terms of process efficiencies worldwide. What we needed was a simple way to publish existing documents, and new documents in existing formats. Up until this point, our company had relied on Lotus Notes, a popular groupware solution, to distribute content.
Notes has well-known virtues for shorter messages and unstructured documents.
But for more complex documents, including those authored with GE-standard Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, Notes is weaker. For one thing, it requires heavy administration. After years of use, abuse, and administrative neglect we found oursleves with over 1,800 postings on our news and information system. Notes also proved to be labor and bandwidth intensive. Sharing documents with our offices around the world proved to be problematic.