Prior to deployment, mailbox management was a cumbersome task for the University College with staff saving every email and attachment, putting tremendous pressure on the Windows 2003 Exchange servers.. The mailbox store was transferred to tape each night, but distinct question marks began to emerge on the speed and reliability of email retrieval. This process required manual sifting through tape backups, and often such retrievals were aborted because they were so labour-intensive.
Richard Corn is the IT Services Manager at the University College, who elaborates:-“Email is undoubtedly the lifeblood of the University. It is the route that lecturers and support staff choose to communicate, swap research, notes and data intensive PPTs to students. It is also the primary communication method in which to extend the coursework for remote virtual learners. On average traffic days, this constitutes to 15,000 emails across 300 mailboxes.”
To address the pressures, the University College came to the conclusion that it needed to implement an archiving solution to reduce the mailbox store; provide accurate retrieval; and facilitate easy migration. Their trusted advisor, Cristie Data Solutions, created a tender document for three email management companies. After thorough evaluation, Bishop Grosseteste opted for C2C’s ArchiveOne.
A key benefit of ArchiveOne was deemed to be its flexible archiving policy.
In this case, two policies were elected by the University College, firstly that took any email delivered more than 2 months earlier and archived it automatically; and secondly was a daily archive of all emails in the compliance journal mailbox , which were archived for long term retention.
Associated repositories were established in calendar quarters for ease of management.
“Prior to implementation, we allowed unlimited mailbox size for staff, hence we were constantly storing emails and their massive attachments without any quality management – we just simply didn’t have the capacity or the bandwidth to continue to manage such a burgeoning system,” Richard explains.
Following ArchiveOne's installation, the archiving process is automated so users remain unaware of the massive back-office changes, with most assuming that the emails still reside in their Outlook mailbox.
The desired effect on reducing the overall email store has also occurred. An upgrade from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 was greatly simplified as more than 50% of the email content no longer resided on the server, resulting in equivalent reduction in the upgrade time onto the three new virtual servers. As a result of the automated archiving, over 65% of space was saved.
Exchange is now performing more effectively having reduced the volume of data being held.
As ArchiveOne operates without a cumbersome indexing database, unlike competitive solutions, performance is increased, while manageability and scalability is assured. In terms of email retrieval, gone are the days of intensive searching through back-up tapes. ArchiveOne was put to the test with a mailbox being deleted after 6 months of an employee leaving the University College. As a full copy of the employee's emails still existed in the Compliance Repository, a complete restore happened within minutes of identifying the date and the 'to/from' field on the correspondence in question.
The desired effect to reduce the overall email store has been achieved. An upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2007 was greatly simplified as more than 50% of the email content was no longer on the server, resulting in an equivalent reduction in the upgrade time. As a result of the automated archiving, over 65% of space has been saved. Exchange is now performing more effectively as the volume of data being held has been greatly reduced. As ArchiveOne operates without a cumbersome indexing database, unlike competitive solutions, performance is increased while manageability and scalability are assured.
In terms of email retrieval, gone are the days of intensive searching through back-up tapes. ArchiveOne was put to the test with a mailbox being deleted after 6 months of an employee leaving the University College. As a full copy of the employee’s emails still existed in the Compliance Repository, a complete restore happened within minutes of identifying the date and the 'to/from' field on the correspondence in question.
For the future, as the University looks to rollout Microsoft Exchange 2010, the Team are assured with ArchiveOne running seamlessly behind the scenes, the effort involved in the upgrade will be significantly reduced. Richard summarises his experience of ArchiveOne: “It’s a very easy to use, stable, effective system that remains invisible and has minimal end user impact.”