Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) invents, designs, and builds digital products and systems that protect power grids around the world. Their technology prevents blackouts and enables customers to improve power system reliability and safety at a reduced cost. A 100 percent employee-owned company headquartered in Pullman, WA, SEL has manufactured products in the United States since 1984 and serves customers worldwide. Their mission is simple: to make electric power safer, more reliable, and more economical.
SEL has been using Lotus Notes, now HCL Domino for more than 25 years. Their Domino applications support various mission critical tasks in areas such as Manufacturing, Product Testing, R&D, Quality, Sales, and Customer Service. And in charge of the development and maintenance of all of those applications is Software Engineering Manager Glenn Boudreaux. I recently had the opportunity to sit down (albeit virtually) with Glenn and chat about his Domino environment and his experience with Teamstudio.
Glenn Boudreaux, Software Engineering Manager
“We’ve been using Notes/Domino for a very long time,” says Glenn. “My team maintains a large portfolio of applications. For example, our Customer Feedback application. Our top two SEL Values are Quality and Customer Focus. These values, along with others, define our company culture and each employee’s commitment to our customers. The Customer Feedback application helps our business by gauging customer satisfaction and feedback to help improve our products and to ensure we provide industry leading customer service.”
Glenn came to SEL in 2011 and says he wanted to empower his team to write code in an agile environment providing quality continuous delivery using industry standard build-test-deploy methodologies. “When I came to SEL nine years ago, maintaining Notes code was a very manual process. We had to be sure we kept copies of point releases for agents and other design elements that we maintained. I had used Teamstudio at my previous company for several years and really liked how it helped us to smoothly build, test, and quickly deploy high quality applications.”
To achieve his goal, Glenn introduced Teamstudio CIAO! and Build Manager to the team. “These tools provide us with versioning control. In the rare case that we have to roll back a software update, Teamstudio CIAO! makes the process of rolling back to a previous point release fast and easy. We brought a Teamstudio engineer on-site to install the product and train all of our Notes software developers in the proper use of the tools.”
Since Glenn deployed the Teamstudio tools several years ago, I asked him whether he’s had occasion to use our support services. “Teamstudio product support is excellent,” Glenn says. “The times we have needed support for an issue, we have always received a prompt response and resolution the same day or next day. Sometimes we contact support just to ask a casual question, and always get a quick response.”
But there’s more. In February 2020, after HCL had acquired the Domino platform from IBM, Glenn decided to switch to Teamstudio for the annual renewal of his Domino license subscriptions. I asked him why. “A previous long time vendor was no longer offering Notes and Domino license renewals and I needed to find a new vendor. Since Teamstudio has been such a great partner in helping transform and organize our Notes development and providing fantastic support, they were the first that came to mind for our 2020 license renewals.”
Throughout our conversation, one thing that struck me about Glenn is that he is very aware of the company values. Many companies have values that might be published somewhere on their web site and then forgotten. But you get a real sense that SEL’s values drive what they do. Glenn’s Domino-based customer service app is at the heart of that: supporting the company’s top two values of Quality and Customer Focus.
It’s nice to be able to contribute toward that effort.
To learn more about how Teamstudio can help with your HCL Domino application development and maintenance needs, click below to start a conversation.