Brita
For almost 40 years, BRITA has been among the leading experts in the field of water optimization. The family business manufactures water filtration products for household and professional applications, which are available in over 70 countries worldwide.
At BRITA Water Filter Systems Ltd in Great Britain, IT Manager Tim Henry, was looking for a way to resolve mailbox size issues and stop dependence on PST files.
“Capacity within Exchange and the use of PST files was becoming an issue,” confirms Henry. “Like so many others, our email users had started to rely on them because of lack of server space.”
Many organizational email systems are peppered with PST files as a way to overcome mailbox quota limitations. These files can be hard to live with, both for the end user and for the IT department and were not intended as a long-term, continuous-use method of storing messages in an enterprise environment. More often than not, PST files are overlooked by normal backup and maintenance processes, tricky to locate, and have a known tendency to corrupt when they approach their maximum size.
Henry continues, “After a few years, some of these PST files were massive – and they were multiplying! For example, our sales director was found to have 15 different PST folders, and most of these were approaching 1Gb in size. I was concerned that they might implode.”
“Understanding we needed a better long-term solution, we started to look for Email Archiving solutions and focused our search on a cost-effective, easy-to-use, yet powerful solution which would allow us to enforce mailbox quotas without resorting to PST files. ArchiveOne from C2C met all of our criteria,” explains Henry.
ArchiveOne searches for and in PST files on local disks. Once found, the stored emails can be archived automatically, using central criteria, reducing the PST files size. The archived emails are then included easily into backup processes.
Beyond this, ArchiveOne can also be used to migrate all PST file content onto the archive server thereby removing the need for them. However, there will always be some, often very senior, users within any organization who have their own very good reasons for maintaining PST files. ArchiveOne can help organizations that accept that .PST files are going to exist for a while longer, as well as those that are focused on full migration as soon as possible.
“The administration of ArchiveOne is very intuitive, and it has great functionality. We were really impressed. The C2C support team was excellent too, and we really appreciated their efforts,” says Henry.
Once rolled out across senior staff, the benefits were immediate, says Henry. “When the Managing Director could not locate an important email, ArchiveOne’s discovery features tracked it immediately.”
Email archiving boosts the capacity of the email system. Administrators benefit immediately from reduced mailbox size, and email users are less frustrated by mailbox quotas as ArchiveOne will archive email automatically whenever a user approaches their limits.
Using BRITA’s email policy criteria, ArchiveOne selects and archives information from mailboxes, PST files and public Exchange folders automatically and invisibly. The locations, types and retention periods of the archives are flexible and selectable by administrators.
ArchiveOne replaces the messages on email servers with a short summary and a link to the archive. Users are able to access archived email directly from their mail client software, and the email is reinstated to original status quickly and seamlessly. ArchiveOne improves productivity for email users and not just by providing them with seemingly unbounded storage, as Henry has found. “Before ArchiveOne, a typical scenario would involve a senior staff member unable to find an important email. Usually their personal assistant would spend time trying to track the email and if unsuccessful, would eventually call IT. In turn we would have to drop everything to pursue this email, searching across locations, laptops and all the ‘stores’ we could locate.”
Henry explains, “The best thing about ArchiveOne is its transparency. You don’t need to think about whether or not to archive the email and if so, to where. Our users no longer waste time selecting old messages for deletion and doing other mailbox maintenance. It has removed significant management and maintenance frustration, and our days of receiving phone calls asking to find ‘lost’ email are over.”