Borgess Health Alliance implements Golden MailBridge

Borgess Medical Center, part of the Borgess Health Alliance based in Kalamazoo Michigan, is the preeminent, 426-bed regional acute-care hospital for southwest Michigan offering more than 35 medical specialties, including nationally recognized cardiac and neurologic care.

Historically, Borgess has been a user of mainframe computers for much of its processing, with IBM's OfficeVision being used for e-mail by its 500 Administrative, Managerial and IS staff.

But limitations in host-based systems, accessibility to other platforms and the need to integrate applications with the Internet led the Borgess IS staff to investigate replacing OfficeVision with a client-server based solution. Lotus Notes was subsequently chosen as the future platform for Borgess Medical Center.

A heavy dependence on mainframe-connected 3270 terminals has meant that migration to Lotus Notes has to take place as infrastructure changes and budgets allow. Therefore, one of the prime drivers for successfully implementing Lotus Notes has become its co-existence with the legacy platform.

To facilitate this requirement, Borgess chose two products marketed by ReSoft International, OfficePath/SNADS and Golden MailBridge. OfficePath/SNADS is a mainframe application that provides the ability for OV/MVS to communicate with other e-mail systems, via the IBM SNADS protocol. Golden MailBridge sits on the Windows NT platform and integrates Lotus Notes with SNADS. The combined solution allows bi-directional e-mail delivery between the two systems.

"The combination of these products from ReSoft has given us the ability to connect together our two e-mail groups." says David Thompson, Vice President of Information Services. He adds "This in turn will enable us to gradually migrate users to the new platform as the infrastructure develops and as users require the function offered by Lotus Notes while maintaining communication with the existing user base".