Background
Wyre Forest is a local government district in Worcestershire, England, covering the towns of Kidderminster, Stourport-on-Severn and Bewdley, as well as several civil parishes and their villages. Its council is based in Stourport-on-Severn.
Centralised Email Archiving: A Component in Consolidating Wyre Forest District Council’s IT Infrastructure
At present, the Wyre Forest IT Department is consolidating the Wyre Forest District Council’s IT infrastructure to a single administration site and a call centre.
Email is a business-critical application for the District Council. Even the shortest period of email downtime can have a serious impact on day-to-day business operations for the end users. This is the reason improving email management has an important place in the implementation of the new IT strategy.
Currently, collaboration for approximately 700 email users is provided though Novell GroupWise 8, though the email platform may undergo replacement in the next two years due to integration incompatibility with some of the back-office business systems and unified communication software that is being deployed internally.
Peter Wooton, Project Leader for Operational and Network Support, who is responsible for post-installation management of all networks and servers, including the district’s messaging system, explains the reasons for the potential shift in direction: "GroupWise is an excellent collaboration platform and works very well for us. The problem is the lack of integration with other applications on our path towards consolidating our systems."
One of the steps in the IT consolidation project was deploying centralised email archiving. During the evaluation phase Wyre Forest looked at several archiving products, in addition to Messaging Architects' M+Archive, but they were disqualified as none of them integrated with both GroupWise and Exchange at the level the District Council’s IT Department needed.
"We looked at some of the other products but they were lacking the integration," continues Wooton. "Some worked only with GroupWise, others only with Exchange. M+Archive gives us the best of both worlds."
M+Archive was selected because it integrates with both GroupWise and Exchange and provides the same functionality in both email environments. In other words, investing in the solution at this stage will not be affected even after an eventual migration to another email platform.
Wooton is also aware of the benefits of offloading the emails residing in GroupWise to a centralised archive prior to a future migration to Exchange. The amount of data that will have to be moved to the new email system will be dramatically reduced, thereby simplifying the entire process. At the same time, the archived records will remain fully accessible through M+Archive.
"Once we have all the email into the archive, it will make life so much easier. Whenever the decision to switch to Exchange is made, we don’t have to worry about investing into a new archiving solution as M+Archive integrates with Outlook and Exchange. So for us M+Archive was the logical choice."
Another key reason that prompted the Wyre Forest District Council IT Section to go ahead with email archiving project is the Freedom of Information Act, which mandates them as a local government to retain and produce email records requested by the public.
Wooton describes in no uncertain terms that without an archiving solution handling FOIA requests relating to emails is a huge pain: "Producing records for an FOIA request across multiple user mailboxes without centralised archiving is an absolute nightmare. It means giving our FOIA Officer proxy access to all mailboxes and then having them to go into each one of them and searching them individually."
The issue is compounded even more if the request has to do with a user who no longer works for the District. When a user leaves, their mailbox remains in the email system, it is not deleted. Even though the account is disabled and deactivated, the message store still exists. And it still falls under the Freedom of Information Act with respect to public access.
The Bottom Line: Investment in M+Archive Solves Compliance Mandates, Simplifies Email Lifecycle Management, and Improves Email System Performance
By implementing centralised archiving on the GroupWise system, Wyre Forest will improve the performance of its current email system and significantly simplify the process of handling FOIA requests. Looking into the future, the M+Archive implementation will also prepare the District for a much easier migration path to Exchange.
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