Essex Southend-on-Sea Opts for C2C

C2C Systems Ltd announced that the Essex borough
of Southend-on-Sea is using
ArchiveOne to optimise 2,300 staff mailboxes and achieve compliance.

Southend has a population of more than 166,000 and has experienced 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 Outlook to create PST files.
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 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 were:

• The size of the information store was reduced, upon the ICT creating archiving
  policies to archive older emails. Prior to implementation
  there had been 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 a search, retrieval and retention
  solution – that could identify relevant records, access their situation and
  respond accordingly.
• ArchiveOne’s eDiscovery feature 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.

It handled eDiscovery requests for compliance: Whilst infrequent,
the Council remains committed to retrieve every requested communication under
the Freedom of Information Act.

It 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 – 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."