June 1, 2007 - Winchester City Council has selected Waterford Technologies's MailMeter Archive to reduce email storage and gain better control of managing emails.

The software will enable Winchester City Council to import over 300 Personal Storage (.PST) files into the exchange server and reduce storage by up to 80 percent.

Winchester City Council is responsible for 112,000 constituents in the Hampshire region. With a drive for more efficient and modern working practices, and policies to reduce printing, more work was being carried out through email.

This placed increasing strain on the storage limits of Winchester City Council’s multiple servers on its virtual server network. As a result, server performance began to decrease, back-up times increased, quotas become more stringent and .PST files were created by users to try and keep important e-mail records.

With over 650 mailboxes, the importing of .PST files to the servers and the back-up of files was a costly and time-consuming process. Compounding the storage problem was the fact that, as a public authority, Winchester City Council is required to retrieve and present data upon request under the Freedom of Information Act.

The council required a best practice approach to email storage and retrieval. It selected MailMeter Archive because it has been proven to reduce storage by 80 percent through its intelligent ‘stubbing’ process. Attachments from older emails are replaced with links (‘stubs’) to the attachments in the email archive, where they are compressed and stored separately from the mail server. This creates additional capacity without having to invest in additional storage servers, or use personal storage which means all emails can be kept on the exchange server.

Jane Maughan, information management and technology officer at Winchester City Council, said: “We were facing a number of problems with having emails saved locally by users and also the archiving problems that arise from increasing email volumes. Solving our storage issue with MailMeter Archive was simple and straightforward. Because it is easy to use, users are now encouraged to save on the exchange server rather than locally, which is best practice for managing email with the added benefits of increasing our storage capacity and reducing administrative costs.”

Winchester City Council has been using MailMeter Forensic to address data compliance issues but with the implementation of MailMeter Archive, it will benefit from the eDiscovery element of the solution for faster search and retrieval of emails. This is particularly important if requested to present data within a short time frame, sometimes within 48 hours.