South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust
Two Shires Ambulance NHS Trust (now known as South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust) served more than 1.3 million people across Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire in the UK. With 850 staff including Paramedics, Technicians, Patient Transport and HQ staff, the Information Technology team has fought to control the ever-increasing volume of email amidst the need to be able to quickly respond to Freedom of Information requests.
Environment:
- Exchange 2000; 400 active mailboxes on 24 sites
- Increasing volumes of email
- Retention and Discovery requirements of Freedom of Information Act
Two Shires Ambulance chose ArchiveOne Policy to deliver an automated email archiving system for retention and retrieval of its critical email data in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. ArchiveOne provides the structure for storing and accessing crucial public interest data in accordance with policy and regulations, while reducing the mailbox size overhead by 50%.
ArchiveOne works seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange 2000. The flexibility of ArchiveOne means that Two Shires can archive email to match many different needs including the creation of multiple storage repositories. Copies of all emails in the Exchange system will be held in separate repositories from the active data repositories accessible to users. Personal Storage Files (PSTs), that were previously hard to manage and represented a risk to e-policy enforcement, can now be archived and easily accessed.
Capacity management is made simple as messages kept in the mailbox are replaced by small links to archived emails, clicking on the link retrieves the message. User access to email is therefore maintained, while overloaded mailboxes are better managed to aid system performance. When mailbox links are deleted after a certain period, the email users can still search their archives for the data.
Russell Wilson, Senior IT Support Analyst at Two Shires said, “We are now able to control our PST files. Tracking, accessing and managing email content is no longer a headache and the mailbox store size is back under our control; even data backup is more streamlined. ArchiveOne has proven to be easy to install and any permitted staff member familiar with Microsoft Exchange can administer it, plus the user interaction via Outlook is simple and clear."
On July 1, 2006, the Royal Berkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, the Hampshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, the Oxfordshire Ambulance NHS Trust, and the Two Shires Ambulance NHS Trust (Bucks only) merged to become the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust is the authority responsible for providing NHS ambulance services in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire, Portsmouth, and Southampton, in the South East England region.