Harrow College Selecting C2C Systems Archive One

C2C Systems has announced that Harrow
College (an Associate College of the
University of Westminster & Middlesex) has achieved full PST Management and
control of 350 lecturers’ and staff mailboxes who support the 10,000 student
population.

With email the primary means of
communication between staff and students, mailbox management was becoming a
problem for the College.

Dave Young, the College’s
Network and Development Manager, elaborates: "We are seeing vast growth in the volume and size of files that staff
share, exchanging invaluable coursework, PowerPoint presentations, images and
other high capacity files. On a single day alone, the email system volume
reached 50,000 messages indicating the distinct upward trend in volumes."

Addressing the growth and
proliferation of PSTs under Exchange 2003 was another concern for Dave’s team.
They suspected widespread use of PST files which are hard to detect and backup.
In addition, the College implemented the Moodle Course Management System, allowing
students to access and submit coursework online with staff returning marked
projects via email, necessitating a proof of sending and receipt of work. An email archiving system was needed to achieve compliance and address
the PST management challenge.

"Compliance is a delicate subject within most education establishments.
We are dealing with young peoples’ futures, so we are tightly regulated,
especially by the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts. Achieving
full watertight compliance is tricky with limited budgets, so at Harrow we were
looking to achieve a ‘best practice’ approach; one that allows us to secure
communications and retrieve relevant data in a timely manner."

Retrieval requests could only
be achieved through restoration of the Exchange Information Store through
indexed tape backup reinstating all the files back onto the live server. After
reviewing several vendors, C2C’s ArchiveOne was selected. Coinciding with the move to  Exchange 2007, the first challenge was to
automate the discovery of PST files on servers, desktops and laptops and to
report on their age, ownership and content to the administrator. The information
provided about PSTs, enabled the team to make decisions about the archiving
policy; setting the policies to automatically archive every email over a year
old and identify and reduce mailboxes that were no longer used by students.

Two years into the
installation, results remain evident to both staff and the IT management team.
Users report no change in email usage and management.

Dave expands: "The less we hear from users, the better, it
means that the system is working just as we intended – seamlessly managing
email in the background – and taking archiving decisions away from staff and
placing them into a cohesive infrastructure that achieves compliance."

With this solution in place the
team can retrieve files using specific search terms, including phrases and
general conversation topics. And the infrastructure is easier to manage. With
an email management structure in place, the team are not faced with a system
that exhausts costly primary storage.

"C2C’s ArchiveOne has benefited the college tremendously, supplying a
major part of the enhanced email infrastructure that we now provide. It
provides us with the functionality and confidence that we could no longer be
without." Dave Young, Network and Development manager, Harrow College