A Major Real Estate Bank, Germany

Case Study – A Major Real Estate Bank, Germany

Large-scale real estate development needs specialist financing – flexible, tailored finance arrangements with rapid credit approvals and security. This is exactly what our customer, a major real estate bank headquartered in Germany has succeeded in providing to the international market, and they are one of the largest providers of these services in Europe.

International finance is a fast moving world of changing client needs and regulatory requirements but needs a base of security and stability. Senior management have a lot of things to worry about, and day to day management of their IBM Lotus Domino environment shouldn’t be one of them.

We were pleased, therefore, when they turned to HADSL’s FirM 2.0 to assist in the day to day management of their Domino environment.

Prior to the installation of FirM 2.0 the bulk of the workload for new user registration, user maintenance and group maintenance within the Domino environment fell on their experienced Domino administrators, and their workload was increasing. They wanted to implement a package that would help them reduce this burden and also realise certain specific objectives:

to devolve the ability to create/modify and delete Domino users and groups to local IT without having to train them in Domino administration;
to reduce the workload on the Domino administration team so that they could concentrate on project work;
to increase the security of the Domino environment by reducing the number of people who have the rights to edit the Domino Directory directly;
to ensure that changes were performed in a uniform and controlled manner; and
to allow the bank’s Internal Audit department to view all changes to the system and account for them.

FirM 2.0 allowed them to achieve these objectives through its use of a simple, Notes-based interface and a configuration of profiles that mapped the business environment to their Domino environment. Secure, encrypted repositories for certifier files and passwords meant that these sensitive entities could remain safely locked away and FirM’s proxy processing model meant that the Domino Directory could be locked down to Reader level for all except for the properly qualified Domino administration team. FirM’s logging and archiving capabilities ensured that Internal Audit could be satisfied in their need to monitor changes to the Domino environment.

We witnessed the effect of a FirM installation immediately when members of the help desk were trained in the procedure for registering a new user. Using the Notes client, they were able to create request in FirM supplying no more information than the selection of a profile (that was described in business rather than technical terms) and the user’s name. They did not need to worry about which mail server the user should be using, which certification hierarchy to use or which groups the new user should be added to. The Domino administrators were able to walk away secure in the knowledge that one whole layer between the business’s need and the provision of the service had been removed.

Since then we have maintained a close relationship with the customer and have worked with them to further extend FirM’s capabilities. Active monitoring for changes to sensitive groups has been developed and deployed, and FirM’s Application Management module was developed to provide detailed reporting and monitoring of ACL changes to Domino applications in the environment.

HADSL specialise in developing tools that help your business streamline Domino. To find out more on how we can help your business please contact Richard Sampson on +44 7958 633646 or email us at sales@hadsl.com