Trox UK uses C2C’s ArchiveOn

With over 50 years track record of working in close collaboration with demanding clients from around the globe, the TROX Group is a  terminal air conditioning system provider who design and manufacture indoor climate control systems and components.

Operating via subsidiaries in 22 countries and with a worldwide network of representatives and importers, TROX Group employs over 3,000 staff and generates annual revenues in excess of €380 million. TROX UK’s offices are based in Thetford, Norfolk.

About the email infrastructure:
An extremely high proportion of TROX’s communications with its existing and potential clients is undertaken via email.  The emails frequently include large attachments, such as technical drawings, plans and schematics and according to Lee Daniels, TROX UK’s System Administrator, the sheer size of the emails being held on the existing email servers was seriously affected the system’s overall performance. “We have around 150 email accounts and some of those were over 7 gigabytes in size”, explained Lee. “We had to free up space and ensure that if we archived older emails, they could be easily accessible.”

By the very nature of its business, TROX UK enters into long term relationships with its customers, designing, developing and manufacturing complex air distribution and comfort conditioning systems that require substantial up-front investment and undergo changes during the design and development stages to precisely meet the requirements of its clients. It is therefore crucial that all emails that map out the entire process and allied correspondence are securely stored and easily accessible.

Longterm email archive facility required:
“Emails are a crucial part of our business,” continued Lee. “We communicate via emails with partners, customers and suppliers and it is vitally important that all emails and attachments are stored so that we have a full audit trail of each entire process.”

Recognising the need to implement a powerful, secure and easy-to-use email archiving system that would have the capabilities of handling such a high volume of large emails and attachments, TROX UK started the evaluation process. “Over several months, we evaluated several solutions,” said Lee. “In reality we were also evaluating the supplier as well. Our business is all about establishing and building long-term relationships with our customers, and we wanted the same sort of relationship with our solutions provider.”

EACS was already a partner of TROX UK, having implemented a new server farm. “Back in 2006, EACS helped us upgrade our IT infrastructure and since then provided us with support and development services on a regular basis,” added Lee. “We were impressed with their technical knowledge and willingness to roll up their sleeves to get the job done. Having a partner that was UK-based was also seen as a benefit, so we asked EACS to propose an email archiving solution.”

The Solution:
The EACS solution was based around C2C’s ArchiveOne, an email archiving solution that helps organisations solve the headaches of email capacity management, enforce email retention policies and comply with various internal and regulatory requirements regarding the use and retention of email.

“From the outset, ArchiveOne appeared to provide all of the capabilities and features that we required,” said Lee. “The more we evaluated this solution, the more it became apparent that ArchiveOne would allow us to reduced mailbox size and storage costs, manage our email retention policies and improves email user productivity.”

TROX UK’s ArchiveOne email solution is now live and has delivered immediate benefits. “The strain on our email storage system has disappeared,” explained Lee. “The demand for storage on our email server has gone down by 60% since we implemented ArchiveOne and we have seen noticeable improvements in the overall performance of our servers.”

TROX UK’s solution automatically archives all emails once they are two months old – effectively keeping the size of the live email server database static. In addition, as many of TROX UK’s employees are lap-top based and are frequently out of the office, Lee has been particularly impressed with the way in which ArchiveOne automatically archives emails that are more than 2 months old from each laptop as a background task whenever it is connected to the corporate network.

So how easy is it for users to access emails that have been archived in ArchiveOne? “As far as the user is concerned, there is no appreciable difference,” concluded Lee. “Every email is still listed in each user’s inbox or folders, the only difference being that the older emails are now stored centrally on the archive database, freeing up local storage and improving the overall performance of each PC.”

Notable Results: Immediate and secure access to archived emails:

• Email information store is indexed, archived and stored effectively, including all attachments.
• Storage demand on central email server reduced by 60%.
• No noticeable differences when individual users access archived emails.
• Substantially reduced mailbox sizes that broadly remain static as emails over 2 months old are automatically archived each day.