University of Dundee turns to Messaging Architects for savings, simplicity

Contributed by Sacha Veillette (Freitag, 27 August 2010) | Category : Email archiving

In its search for a reliable email archiving solution that offered storage optimization without hindering the productivity of its students and staff, the University of Dundee in the UK chose Messaging Architects' M+Archive. Furthermore, Messaging Architects' use of email stubbing helped the university properly store emails without negatively impacting its email server storage capacity.

Ideally, users of the university's email system would not store more than 300 megabytes of data in their email accounts. However, the university is hesitant to limit those who surpass the 300MB allotment to avoid hampering productivity. Similarly, deleting these messages - especially those from various administrators and department heads - could make the school non-compliant with various regulations. While UK mandates are not as strict as they are in the United States for educational institutions, the university reports M+Archive has helped in the limited instances requiring eDiscovery.

"In the past, when we had to look for specific emails, we would actually have to go into the live email system to access the particular account - this wasn't so easy, given that GroupWise is very secure," Mary Shrimpton, email service coordinator at the University of Dundee, said. "Overall, it was a very time-consuming process that involved finding the messages in question, copying and printing them. M+Archive really makes the search and retrieval process much faster and easier."

Beyond that, email is a business-critical aspect of the university's daily operations, so implementing any solution that resulted in downtime or a slower system would pose a major issue.

"Email is very important for our institution and has to be available all the time," Shrimpton said. "In fact, some of the business processes we use depend on email arriving and being acted on, so we are very reliant on it."

Also adding to Messaging Architects' appeal was its support for Novell GroupWise, University of Dundee's collaboration platform. While M+Archive has not been implemented across the university's departments just yet, the school is slowly rolling it out. At the moment, any message older than two years has been moved from the GroupWise server and placed in the archive. UD typically stores messages for two years before deleting the superfluous correspondence. Since any message more than 24 months old was likely saved for a reason, moving these to the email archiving solution made the most sense as an early step in the process.

The amount of information stored on some users' accounts surpasses as many as 10 gigabytes, according to Shrimpton. While there are some recommendations in terms of which correspondence to save, Shrimpton and other IT decision makers avoid implementing strict limitations.

"Essentially, users choose what to keep. While the majority manages with the allocated size, there are some very large mailboxes, as well - with sizes of 10 GB and above," Shrimpton said. "There are power users who need larger mailboxes to do their work, and we can’t really restrict them."

M+Archive is also a good investment for the University, as the product supports both the GroupWise and the Exchange email platforms and comes with a built-in email migration tool. Should the school opt to change platforms in the future, M+Archive will make this process easier because a reliable email archiving solution is already in place without the need for additional spending on new licenses or the purchase of a separate migration tool.

"Nothing has been decided at this point in time," Shrimpton said. "However, in the event that we have to move away from GroupWise, having the bulk of messages already residing in a separate archive repository in a format that is accessible regardless of the email platform will be a huge benefit both in terms of time and cost savings."