Texas Department of Transportation
Providing a Compliant, Email Archiving Solution
Texas Department of Transportation Chooses M+Archive to Meet the Challenges of Email Retention and Discovery.
Background
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has a history that dates back to 1917 when the Texas Legislature established the Texas Highway Department to administer federal funds for road construction and maintenance. In 1975 the agency was merged with the Texas Mass Transportation Commission, and in 1991, the Texas Legislature added the Department of Aviation, and the Texas Motor Vehicle Commission to create TxDOT. TxDOT now consists of 28 divisions with offices in 25 geographical districts. The department uses Novell’s GroupWise 6.5 as its messaging & collaboration system, ensuring secure and reliable communication among its 11,000 employees. GroupWise helps TxDOT fulfill its mission of providing a higher quality of life for the citizens of Texas.
Challenge
As a state agency, TxDOT needs to be compliant to the Texas Public Information Act, which was designed to provide access to public information, including email messages and other electronically delivered documents. To fulfill this requirement in the most cost-effective way, TxDOT needed an enterprise-class solution capable of processing over 11,000 GroupWise mailboxes while also providing quick and easy access to the contents of archived mailboxes. In addition, given the scope of the project, access to expert-level GroupWise technical support in the deployment phase was seen as a priority.
As a direct result of deploying the chosen solution, TxDOT wanted to:
• Eliminate native GroupWise archiving and provide a simpler method for long-term storage of messages.
• Ensure that messages remain accessible to end users, regardless of whether the information is held on-line or near-line.
• Provide flexible content search capabilities across messages and attachments.
• Easily flag, comment and export these messages.
• Find a permanent solution to stop production GroupWise post offices from failing due to large database corruption.
Solution
TxDOT evaluated and tested several different products to help them better manage their ever-growing GroupWise storage needs. They decided to implement M+Archive from Messaging Architects as it was the solution that best met their detailed technical requirements. M+Archive is a comprehensive solution for management, archival and discovery of information within Novell GroupWise messaging systems. Using an advanced policy engine, GroupWise data is automatically extracted from users' mailboxes and placed in either GroupWise-native archives or platform-independent, XML formatted, text files. The policy engine can flag messages based on an organization’s specific requirements, such as mailbox size management, real-time auditing, or long-term archiving and information discovery.
Publishing both live & archived GroupWise data to XML also solved the search and discovery requirements of TxDOT since it automatically indexes the content of each email, including attached files. The advanced search functions can be run simultaneously across multiple user's message archives using either full text, soundex, proximity searching, or based on a pre-configured wordlist. Search results can easily be exported, printed, or flagged for compliance. This XML based storage architecture is highly scalable, providing retention and quick searching capabilities on millions of messages and thousands of users. Information needed for potential litigation or for internal auditing purposes can now be accessed quickly and easily, without any platform dependancies. This is far more efficient than the previous approach of restoring GroupWise email from back-up tapes, and it literaly saves TxDOT's IT team weeks of work on each request.
In conclusion, implementing email management through M+Archive will virtually eliminate the risk of downtime due to database corruption caused by bloated user mailboxes. The investment in M+Archive will result in impressive cost savings for TxDOT, and of course a better ROI for the taxpayers of Texas.
* Reference to any specific Messaging Architects product or service does not constitute its endorsement or recommendation by the the Texas Department of Transportation.
