C2C has announced that the Essex Borough of Southend-on-Sea is using ArchiveOne to optimise 2,300 staff mailboxes and achieve compliance. Southend has a dense population of more than 166,000 and has experienced significant growth in email communications in recent years. This growth has resulted in pressure on the Borough Council’s storage infrastructure and on the ability to demonstrate compliance within the Freedom of Information Act.

Users were allocated a 75MB mailbox quota that relied on them to practise good email management, having to routinely monitor and regulate the number of messages in folders. Invariably, this led some users to utilize the Auto Archiving prompt within Microsoft Outlook to create PST files (Personal Storage Tables).  This resulted in the proliferation of 1000’s of PST files throughout the organisation, which increased the time of the backup window; were notoriously hard to control and easily corrupted, and consumed valuable file server storage space.

Andy Burrell, Team Leader of the ICT Service Desk retains primary responsibility for email.  “We decided the only way to effectively manage the 100% year on year email growth was to implement an archiving solution that would ease both pressure on mailboxes, the Exchange mailbox store, and that would achieve full demonstrable compliance on the average daily email traffic of 22,000 emails.”

ICT invited C2C to demonstrate their ArchiveOne solution at the Southend data centre running Microsoft Exchange 2003 servers across the main office, ten satellite offices, and supporting their 10% mobile employee workforce. Installation commenced and 4 years down the line, the results remain as impressive for staff as they did on day 1:-

• The size of the Information Store was quickly reduced, upon the ICT creating archiving policies to automatically archive older emails. Prior to implementation there had been great concern for the amount of storage utilized.
  • More automated policies were later implemented for all Southend mailboxes with emails greater than 2MB in size or older than 10 days, further reduced the size of the Information Store. Finally archiving became automatic for those users who ran a mailbox greater than 40% full.
  • ArchiveOne provided an effective search, retrieval and retention solution -- that could quickly identify relevant records, access their situation and respond accordingly.
  • ArchiveOne’s eDiscovery feature quickly identified the discovery of 1000's of PSTs across the organisation.

Within the server room, ArchiveOne remains an essential solution. Andy explains, “With the inbuilt compression of emails, there is a much reduced overhead on the Microsoft Exchange server, which we are now upgrading to Microsoft Exchange 2010”.

ArchiveOne reduced the store by more than 60% and extended the life of the Exchange Server, as the team are still using the server in the original size and format, even with the year on year doubling of growth. 

ArchiveOne seamlessly handled eDiscovery requests for compliance: Whilst largely infrequent, the Council remains committed to retrieve every requested communication under the Freedom of Information Act.  ArchiveOne captures, indexes and stores all emails from specific individuals or groups, and supplies a detailed audit trail. On a recent occasion, the team had to resurrect an entire mailbox of a former employee - seamlessly restoring every email in the archive until the email in question was retrieved.

Andy summarises the experience,

“We know that it is a project that has worked for all our users, with over 90% of all communications now occurring via email and yet only 2% of inbound helpdesk calls cross referencing email.”

“After four years of usage, we are well placed to comment on ArchiveOne. It is a very solid solution, doing exactly what is required each day to seamlessly reduce the mailbox store and keep us compliant. The support is local, excellent and attentive, giving the entire team a feeling of full reassurance that our mail system is in good hands.”

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