Provident Bank migrates to GroupWise via Golden MailBridge for Windows NT

Provident Bank of Maryland has been meeting the financial needs of Maryland for over 110 years. Provident has $3.9 billion in assets and operates 66 branch offices, including 15 in-store locations. serving seven Maryland counties, as well as Baltimore City and southern York County, PA.

These Branches have traditionally used IBM's Personal Services/PC (PS/PC), connected to DISOSS on the mainframe, for electronic communication between branches and head office. As part of an overall Branch modernization program, it was decided to migrate these users to the Novell GroupWise email system. This project was planned to take place over a 12 month period, which immediately generated a need for co-existence between the old systems and the new.

To talk to the DISOSS system, a SNADS based gateway was required. After analyzing their needs, Provident selected the Golden MailBridge product as the bridge between the two environments. It allowed users on PS/PC to be able to exchange information, via SNADS, with the evolving GroupWise environment. Golden MailBridge was installed on a Windows NT platform with the Microsoft SNA Server product.

"The combination of Golden MailBridge and SNA Server gave us a robust and affordable connector that allowed our users to maintain connectivity during the migration project" explains Benita Koller of Provident Bank.