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7,000 Employees of the "Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois" (CHUV) in Lausanne, Switzerland entrust Open-Xchange Server for their communication platform.
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TARRYTOWN, NY, December 9, 2005 - Employing the latest medical treatments and health care management practices the University Hospital of the Swiss canton of Waadt saves lives every day. The hospital has earned an outstanding reputation for its educational, research and health care programs - a reputation that goes well beyond the borders of Switzerland. In the past year alone, more than 41,000 patients were treated and 30,000 emergencies handled by its doctors, medical assistants and nurses. With such a large workload, not only medical technologies but also communication requirements have become increasingly demanding for large hospital operations.
"This was not an easy decision and we had to evaluate an enormous variety of solutions," states René Patthey, hospital CIO. "Ultimately it was the richness of features, the maturity and the stability of the product, combined with a convincing price-performance ratio that underpinned to the our decision for Open-Xchange Server."
In April 2005, the hospital chose Open-Xchange Server 5. In the initial phase, the Open-Xchange modules Portal, Web Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Bookmarks and Bulletin Board were activated for the user base. After comprehensive tests and a pilot installation for the IT department, the first productive users were migrated to the new system in November 2005. "Open-Xchange Server and its web-enabled user interface offers the exact functions we need for efficient collaboration. Accordingly, we were able to avoid additional and costly custom development that would have been necessary with alternative solutions." René Patthey emphasizes.
"Reachability" - Around the Clock and Around the World"
For hospital staff, overall availability and reachability are a must. In addition to the stability and performance of our 5,000 workstations the connectivity of an increasing number of users with mobile devices became mission critical" René Patthey explains.
"Today and in the near future, personal digital assistants (PDA) and smartphones - the fusion of telephone, calendar, address book, text receiver and sender - help to organize the increasingly complex hospital routines in a smooth and efficient way. Today, the hospital staff already uses 560 Palm PDA's models M515, T2 und T3, and the growth in PDA use is rapid" Patthey says. "Our vendor, Open-Xchange Inc., has an intense customer focus and we enjoy a close link to product development which is unique. An outstanding example of this cooperation was the development of PDA and Smartphone connectivity via the standard SyncML interface. We were worked closely with Open-Xchange's development team during the design and test phases and were able to discuss our needs directly with them. Accordingly the results have exceeded our expectations."
Further extensions are already plannned: Following user migration additional Open-Xchange modules will be added to the collaboration environment. The Documents module will enable a reliable and up-to-date exchange of documents, including versioning of documents.
"We are confident that with Open-Xchange Server we are well-prepared for future requirements." Patthey concludes. "This is based on the standardized and modular architecture of the product and the open and transparent development roadmaps characteristic of open source software!"
About Open-Xchange.org
Open-Xchange Server is one of the most active and fastest growing open source projects to date. Launched in August 2004, Open-Xchange Server now ranks #7 out of 334 groupware projects on freshmeat.net web site, #4 in handhelds, and overall #278 out of 47,163 listed projects. The Open-Xchange community web site, http://www.open-xchange.org, is visited by 130,000 unique visitors each month, the GPL version of Open-Xchange Server is downloaded more than 9,000 times each month. In the Open-Xchange forum, 3650 topics are being discussed by 1650 contributors. The Open-Xchange community has contributed 27 installation guides for Open-Xchange Server on Debian, SUSE, Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake, FreeBSD and other operating systems and distributions.
About Open-Xchange Server
Open-Xchange Server 5, the commercial product launched in April 2005, is engineered for ease of installation, migration, administration, integration and use. It interoperates with virtually all web browsers and important proprietary and open source rich clients. Open-Xchange Server supports the two leading Enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat and SUSE. Innovative connectors, OXtenders, enhance customer flexibility by using open standard APIs to integrate existing IT infrastructures, or even extend capabilities to such as fax, VoIP, or CRM solutions.
About Open-Xchange Inc.
Open-Xchange Inc. delivers reliable and scalable groupware, collaboration, and messaging solutions. Its flagship product, Open-Xchange Server, is the market-leading collaboration server that combines best-of-breed open source software with commercial software add-ons and connectors. Open-Xchange Server is among the Top 300 most popular and most active open source projects in the world today. Open-Xchange Inc. is based in Tarrytown, NY, with offices in Olpe and Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, please visit http://www.open-xchange.com
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Contact:
Bill Baker, Baker Communications Group, 860-350-9100, wbaker@bakercg.com
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