Notes, Domino score big with pro hockey

NEW YORK - Even casual fans know it's the Zamboni that makes the ice on which National Hockey League teams go at each other during the season.

Less well known, however, is that it's a Lotus Notes- and Domino-based network that brings these 28 rivals/business partners together outside of the rink year-round.

With the NHL's Stanley Cup Playoffs racing toward a conclusion and the league's annual player draft slated for later this month, this Lotus technology is being taxed like never before, according to Peter DelGiacco, director of IT at NHL headquarters in New York.

"Without this [Notes/Domino] system set up, I wouldn't even want to think about how we would manage the business," DelGiacco says. What he is thinking about, however, is integrating the recently released Notes and Domino 5.0 into a network that links more than 1,000 NHL employees in the U.S. and Canada. The upgrade could help the league cut network connection costs and provide better mobile access for the teams, DelGiacco says.

At the core of the NHL network today is an IBM AS/400 mid-range computer, which stores all league data on player rosters, the multimillion dollar contracts fans envy, trades between teams, game statistics and shared scouting reports. DelGiacco's 15-member IT staff uses Lotus NotesPump, recently renamed Enterprise Integrator, to transfer that data from the AS/400 to a variety of different Notes applications that run on five Domino servers at the league's New York headquarters.

Each of the 28 teams and a satellite league office in Montreal has its own Domino server on-site, all of which run on IBM Netfinity 3000 PC servers. The player data is replicated on a scheduled or as-needed basis from the Domino servers in New York to the team servers over a dedicated frame relay network. Storing that data on team LANs gives end users faster access when running applications, DelGiacco says.

The network gives teams regularly updated versions of lengthy documents such as contracts, as well as more immediate access to time-sensitive information, such as player trades. Teams also receive a variety of Notes applications to help with tasks such as team operations, marketing and public relations.

Prior to installing Notes three years ago, the league had been running AS/400 emulation over a 9.6K bit/sec dial-up connection. Today the teams have 56K bit/sec frame relay connections, while the league office has a T-1, all for less money than they had been spending on the slower network, DelGiacco says.

Notes and Domino 5.0 may cut those costs even more while giving teams much easier access to data while traveling, he says.

"We like [Version 5.0] because it brings together the Web and Lotus Notes in a much tighter way," he says. "I can build one application and make that application available via the Internet or using the Lotus Notes client."

NHL teams currently pay about $850 per month for their frame relay connections, he says. "Ultimately, what we see is eliminating the frame relay and allowing the teams to just get an Internet connection," DelGiacco says.

The NHL has already deployed a few Domino 5.0 servers at its headquarters but won't upgrade the 28 teams until these new servers have been given a more thorough workout.

"I have to be skeptical because if I believed everything everybody said about software, I'd be in a lot of trouble," DelGiacco says.

Establishing a network of this nature is not a project that can be rushed, he says.

"You've got to give yourself ample time to work out the initial bugs and kinks," he says. "When we first did the NotesPump from the AS/400, it wasn't something that would plug and play, so it took us a little bit more time than we anticipated."

In addition to facilitating the league's day-to-day operations, DelGiacco's staff will deploy a temporary Notes/Domino network for the June 26 amateur player draft at Boston's FleetCenter. A newly tweaked custom Notes application will give each of the 28 teams on-site up-to-the-minute information on who has been selected and who remains available, while allowing league officials to do on-the-fly eligibility checks on players before selections are announced.

"A couple of years ago we tried [a Microsoft] Access-based type of system that kind of did the same thing, but it really wasn't networked as tightly as what we did with Lotus Notes," he says. "There was no real workflow either" with the Access system, he adds.

DelGiacco says training team representatives to use the draft-day application has proven surprisingly easy.

"These guys aren't people with strong IT backgrounds, they're hockey people who know hockey," he says. "All you have to do [to use the application] is be able to click a mouse and know who you want to pick. That's something the system won't do - it won't tell you who to pick."