Running a better Lotus Notes-based business with Ytria tools

Back in 2006, Guenter Stumpf, the Managing Director of SOBIS, saw something he wasn’t entirely happy with: his most highly trained technical staffers were spending an inordinate amount of time assisting the help desk. Clearly, he would have rather seen these experienced Domino developers focused on creating new application or improving the company’s existing products.

What is more, no one was to blame for this state of affairs: the company’s sophisticated solutions were often too difficult for a non-specialist to troubleshoot using the native Lotus Notes and Domino tools. Since hiring professional developers and administrators to answer phone calls and emails obviously wasn’t a feasible solution in a competitive market, the company needed a way to help its primary support staff.

SOBIS initially attempted building tools for its own internal use as a means of addressing its support issues, but when Mr. Stumpf became aware of Ytria’s scanEZ and the rest of the EZ Suite toolkit, he immediately recognized how ideally these ready-built solutions addressed his company’s needs.

“We’d been doing application support for a number of years and we were facing numerous problems that required us to write code to resolve; our top programmers would have to sometimes do the support because they were the ones who knew how write a particular agent,” explains Mr. Stumpf. “Then we discovered that these Ytria tools were capable of solving our problems more efficiently. “

Empowering Support

With the tools, support staffers were now able to troubleshoot and edit documents in a manner that previously would have required advanced knowledge of view and agent coding.

“We absolutely saw an improvement in help staff productivity,” he says. “There are a number of features in these tools that make your life easier and which allow even a less-highly trained staffer to do support independently.”

“The service desk began solving problems much more quickly,” he adds. “In the past things that took—let’s say half an hour—would now be solved in five minutes thanks to the Ytria tools.”