Binary Tree's Good Migrations Blog Tags

Minimizing & Simplifying Your Domino Infrastructure Costs

Posted by Perry Hiltz, Solutions Architect

Before I joined BinaryTree, I worked for a German based chemical company as one of two Domino Administrators responsible for 40 distributed Domino servers and over 3,500 users. Our configuration consisted of five different Domino domains in North America. We agreed - with management’s buy in – to the idea of consolidating these five domains into a single domain. After many long discussions with our parent company and a final agreement to use this new domain as the basis for a single Global Domain (we had 43 domains total), we began building out our infrastructure. Our goal was to centralize all mail into two sets of clustered servers across two AS/400's.

With our infrastructure in place, we began devising a plan to start manually moving users. We developed a well-defined checklist of 35 different key checkpoints that needed to be accomplished in order to achieve our goal. As the objective was to use local field staff to complete this process, we handed the user move and desktop updates over to field services. We had really good people doing this job, but not all field engineers followed our checkpoints list completely, nor did they follow it in the proper sequence every time. With this manual domain migration approach, when a problem arose, we spent 2-3 hours with the field engineer or the end user trying to resolve the problem. It was a very time consuming and highly inefficient process.

There had to be a better way!

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Posted on 2/9/2011 9:15:00 AM | with 0 comments

Empowering Customers With Support Solutions

Posted by Scott Russo, Customer Support Consultant

What is the goal of customer service? To provide customers with answers to their questions, right? That’s true, however, when it comes to providing GREAT customer service, not only is it about answering questions, but it’s about empowering and enabling the customer with solutions.

It was 10 years ago today (Wednesday). I was at Lotusphere 2001, and finished my sessions, certifications, and sushi with a good friend. I was in Downtown Disney at the Disney Store; my mission was to find a costume for my daughter to wear for her princess birthday party. For anyone that’s been there, you know the store is huge, and very busy. I was a lost, stressed out dad, and didn't have a clue where to go. I know many of you can relate to my situation. Shopping is not a fun, social event, so this was not going to be an easy task. I needed answers and I needed help. I was ready to shoot a signal flare.

A store employee was walking by in a hurry and I asked her if she could direct me to find a Jasmine costume. The employee (let’s call her “Minnie”) was nice enough to stop and answer my question, but what she did next surprised me. She must have noticed the look of confusion on my face. Minnie said, "follow me," and we proceeded to walk to the costume section.

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Posted on 2/3/2011 11:20:41 AM | with 0 comments