Fletcher Allen Health Care
When faced with mailbox quotas as a means to manage mailboxes, most organizations would despair, but when your 6800 staff are managing patient records efficient & effective information retention and storage becomes mission critical.
In its role as a community hospital, Fletcher Allen Health Care (FAHC) serves approximately 150,000 residents of Chittenden & Grand Isle counties and provides primary care services at nine Vermont sites. FAHC is one of the largest employers in the state of Vermont with 6800 employees.
Working across a number of sites, the use of email as a means of communication by employees of FAHC has grown exponentially in recent years, to the point that in order to manage the volume of email data being sent and received mailbox quotas of 50MB per user were imposed. This created frustration for users trying to work within their quotas, and for IT staff in managing them. Identifying the high volumes of email data as being both a security and storage issue, FAHC began researching solutions to address the mailbox size issues and the impact on the growing information store.
Having considered a number of products over a six month period to help address their specific storage needs, Fletcher Allen’s research took them to C2C and the Archive One solution. Installation was completed in almost half the time of the previous product reviews. “We reviewed some very complicated and difficult to install solutions before selecting Archive One for its ease of use, functionality and end-user transparency” commented David Haber, Senior Systems Engineer at Fletcher Allen.
“It was important to find a system that not only improved our storage issues but also ensured that valuable email data wasn’t lost in the process. Once Archive One was identified, I was able to set up my test environment in half a day – and I liked C2C’s whole approach to archiving and its management.”
In conjunction with the archiving project, C2C’s Max Compression was implemented as a preliminary stage to assist with the impositions made by mailbox quotas. An immediate reduction of 50% in mailstore size was achieved by implementing the client version (which automatically zipped and unzipped attachments sent by users) and the server version (which zipped legacy data). The gains were multi-fold as no user training was required, the need to create PSTs was diminished and consequently user productivity increased.
This gave FAHC time to plan and execute the corporate wide implementation of Archive One. Having established the product and following the successful training of administrators and gaining a comfort level with the application, FAHC implemented a live archiving strategy of archiving emails older than 180 days.
“The email system is not a constraint on the business, and users can get on with their tasks in running and providing Health Care to the community” says Haber. Beyond this the Exchange email system is running efficiently and disaster recovery is easy should the situation occur. “The benefits of email archiving have helped both the user and the IT department” commented Haber, “in Archive One we have found a solution for users and the business.”