About the Company
Established January 2000, First Response Finance offers UK-wide motor finance. The company’s Head Office is in Nottingham and there are two additional offices in Glasgow and Leigh, Manchester.
Streamlining Email Management with M+Archive for GroupWise
While the UK-based financial institution doesn’t wholly rely on email for business, the email system constitutes an important business application in their IT infrastructure. First Response uses Novell GroupWise as its collaboration platform. A failure in the system would have a direct impact on the company’s business.
First Response Financial has been using Messaging Architects’ archiving solution since 2005. From a European perspective, they are an early adopter of email archiving. Neil Raspison, IT Service Analyst and responsible for supporting the company’s messaging system, explains what prompted the deployment of M+Archive at the time. “As a financial institution we realized that there were some issues regarding email archiving. Prior to M+Archive, we had no way of preserving email if we were required to review it later.”
Even though currently there are no legal requirements mandating email retention in the UK, First Response Finance wanted to be protected. Based on their current email retention policy, all incoming and sent messages are archived to a central archive repository on an affordable NAS device. Periodically, the archives are purged of the emails of employees who have left the company.
Having an email retention policy simplifies email management and allows lost emails to be restored quickly and effortlessly to the end users. The messages in question are searched and accessed through the M+Archive web viewer, and are subsequently forwarded to the respective users. While such occurrences aren’t daily, email retrieval with M+Archive happens a couple of times every month.
“Even though there is no legal requirement, we still retain our business email in a centralized location,” continues Neil Raspison. “It comes in handy when we get a call looking for an email that was accidentally deleted. Using M+Archive, we are able to find the missing message quickly and painlessly; there is no need resort to backup tapes and the need to recreate the entire post office in order to retrieve the odd message.”
Having M+Archive in place simplifies the overall management of the messages’ lifecycle and reduces the time the company’s IT department has to spend on recovering accidentally deleted or lost messages.
As the administrator who has worked with Messaging Architects’ archiving solution for 5 years now, Raspison has had a very positive experience with it. “It’s a very good product. I like the improvements and enhancements of the administrative interface in the new release we are currently using. It’s easy to use and straight-forward and it works really well.”
Having M+Archive handle all archiving processes has zero impact on end users. They are informed that their business email is retained as part of the organisation’s operational procedures; however, there is no overhead for them as the archiving process is automated and doesn’t require any end-user intervention.
The Bottom Line: Proactively Compliant and Prepared for eDiscovery
M+Archive has enabled First Response Finance to deploy an suitable email retention policy, eliminate the risks of lost messages, and have a robust search engine for discovery requests in place. The easy administration has helped the IT Department simplify and streamline email management.
“I would recommend Messaging Architects-UK to any company that has a need for email security and archiving solutions. The support we have received to date has been prompt and professional and we have an excellent overall relationship,” concludes Neil Raspison.
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