Caritas der Diözese Linz extends a helping hand with IBM Lotus Notes Traveler

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Caritas is the social service organisation of the Roman Catholic church, with 162 subsidiaries working in more than 200 countries around the globe. Caritas supports humanity by providing food, water, medicine, shelter and other services to the world’s most vulnerable people, and is one of the most active social organisations in emergency programming and disaster response planning

Caritas has a strong presence in Austria, with more than 10,000 employees across the country. The organisation is administered by state and by diocese, and the division based in Linz employs around 2,500 people at 60 offices across the region. A major part of the work performed by the Mobile Services department of Caritas der Diözese Linz involves nursing and home care for elderly people and families, and around 300 of the organisation’s employees are trained nursing staff.

“Our nursing staff spend most of their time visiting the people they care for – helping them with their household and caring for children and elderly people,” explains Heike Albert, IT Manager at Caritas der Diözese Linz. “In some cases, they actually live with the families they support. As a result, they don’t have time to visit our offices very often, and in many cases they don’t have access to a PC or the Internet, so it can be a challenge to communicate with them effectively.”

The nursing staff needed to keep a manual record of the time they spent at work. Once a month, they submitted these records by mail to the central office, which would initiate an automated data collection process. After processing and analysing the data using a program implemented on IBM Power Systems technology, the data was printed out again and sent back to the employees by mail. This was a slow and labour-intensive process, causing a two-week delay every month and creating significant workload for administrative staff. Caritas began to look for a better solution.

Built-in solution

Caritas began experimenting with PDAs, using third-party tools to synchronise them with its central IBM Lotus Domino email servers. However, this was not an ideal solution because the synchronisation tools required the installation of client software on Windows-based desktops, and in many cases, the nurses did not have access to a PC.

“We wanted a solution that would do more than just synchronise the PDAs with the central server – we wanted to provide real-time access to email and other systems,” says Andreas Schneeberger, IT Project Manager. “ILS Consult suggested upgrading our IBM Lotus environment, and we were delighted to discover that Lotus Notes Traveler, which is a new component in Lotus Notes and Domino 8, would deliver the functionality we needed.”

ILS Consult, an IBM Premier Business Partner and one of the most successful IT consultancies in Austria, helped Caritas der Diözese Linz upgrade its Lotus Domino servers from version 6.5 to version 8 within just two days. Over the next few months, the Caritas IT team will begin rolling out the new Lotus Notes 8 client to users.

“The ILS Consult team worked well with our in-house team, and we were glad to have their expert technical support during the upgrade,” says Heike Albert. “The Lotus Notes and Domino environment is very user-friendly and our in-house team is very experienced, so we are confident that we will be able to manage and maintain the solution without outside help.”

Saving time and effort

Lotus Notes Traveler provides automatic, real-time replication of email, contacts, calendaring, tasks and journal functions between Caritas’ central Lotus Domino servers and the PDAs of the 300 nursing staff.

“The solution means that our staff can always get access to their email, even if they don’t have access to a PC – so they can keep themselves updated with all the latest information and can communicate with us easily,” says Andreas Schneeberger. “Another useful feature is that they can now use electronic timesheets, which send data directly to the central human resources system – so there is no longer any paperwork for us to process. It is a much faster and more reliable system, saving time for everyone.”

The Lotus Notes Traveler software currently works with any mobile device that runs the Microsoft Windows CE operating system. In the coming months, IBM is planning to extend the range of compatible devices, so Caritas will be able to choose the most reliable and cost-effective handsets.

“We are also looking forward to extending the solution,” says Andreas Schneeberger. “We are hoping to give our mobile workers the same degree of access to central systems as our office-based staff. For example, we want to make it possible to use the PDAs to access the HR system and apply for leave or request training. If we can simplify these processes and reduce the administrative workload for our nursing staff, they will be able to spend more time caring for patients.”

Safe data

Aside from the benefits of the new Lotus Notes Traveler solution, Caritas der Diözese Linz is also benefiting from the improved clustering functionalities of Lotus Domino 8. The organisation currently runs Lotus Domino on two IBM System x3550 servers in its data centre, and is planning to move one of the servers to a different location as part of a new disaster recovery strategy.

“The need for a robust disaster recovery strategy has become increasingly clear over the last few years, as more and more of our day-to-day operations depend on email and other Lotus Domino-based databases and applications,” says Heike Albert. “Lotus Domino 8 automatically mirrors data between servers, so we can be confident that our systems will be safe even if one of the servers fails.”

Flexible working

Heike Albert concludes: “As a social organisation, it is important for us to make the best possible use of our IT budget, so it is a huge advantage that Lotus Notes Traveler is a standard component of Lotus Notes and Domino 8: there are no extra licensing fees or implementation costs.

“By providing mobile access to central IT services, Lotus Notes Traveler makes it easier for our nursing staff to complete vital administrative tasks, enabling them to work more flexibly and spend more time with the people who need them most.”