C2C’s ArchiveOne decreases the mailbox store and achieves compliance at The Donkey Sanctuary

The Donkey Sanctuary, one of the leading worldwide charities for the protection and care of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable donkeys and mules, has adopted C2C ‘s ArchiveOne to bolster 500 staff mailboxes; control PSTs and ease migration through a streamlined email store. Use of ArchiveOne further allows The Donkey Sanctuary to show demonstrable compliance, disclosure and defensible information management across it’s growing network of Sanctuaries, farms, mobile clinics, and Donkey Assisted Therapy centres throughout the world. As a registered charity, The Donkey Sanctuary remains dependent on donations and legacies with annual expenditure of over £26 million for the upkeep of the animals and international community projects, every £ is treated with respect and backed with a desire to maximise operating efficiencies by reducing storage and migration overheads.

Like all organisations, email has become the primary source of internal and external communications. Initially running Microsoft Exchange 2003, but with plans for migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010, lots of employees were lured into the Microsoft Outlook auto-prompt ‘auto archive your old items now’ to create locally based PST files randomly residing on C drives, across on laptops and desktops. Not only had the resultant PSTs proliferated making them hard to discover, but they had become too large to guarantee accurate restore.

In the context of migration to Exchange 2010, the Charities’ Director of Finance and IT, Chris Young, highlighted the concept and benefits of archiving, having read C2C’s article ‘3 Reasons to Archive Email’ which contained references and testimonials from nearby Exeter University, who had successfully used C2C’s ArchiveOne solution to regain in-place control of email management and storage. The Donkey Sanctuary contacted C2C and established that ArchiveOne not only offered archiving and would maximise efficiency and reduce the cost of Microsoft Exchange, but usage would also critically demonstrate compliance with government policies through e-Discovery enablement

The Solution:
With 280 mailboxes of varying usage and additional countries falling under the responsibility of Head Office, heavier users of emails running in excess of 30,000 emails became the first to adopt ArchiveOne. Its first task was to identify all PSTs; rooting out and defining locations and size and applying pre-set automated policies. As the process continued, it rapidly emerged that The Donkey Sanctuary had applied the correct solution, as ArchiveOne highlighted some PSTs files that were as large as 8GB (any PSTs over 2GB are well documented as being hard to restore and are frequently corrupt). With determination applied, users could now seamlessly access PSTs via the archive within their inbox. At the Information Store, policies were set so that any emails older than 60 days would be automatically archived and stored in annual repositiories.

With the Charities’ heaviest email users successfully archived and secured, The Donkey Sanctuary could turn their attention to the roll out of less intensive email accounts. The remaining rollout was seamless - in total, some 115 mailboxes have been installed with ArchiveOne; leaving enough flexible space within the licence for adding additional users in Ireland and Spain or indeed, for swapping users.

Migration to Microsoft Exchange 2010 was the next infrastructure application to be dramatically affected by the resultant email archiving. Keen to migrate the most streamlined email store possible, Andy Brinsford, IT Systems and Support Manager, The Donkey Sanctuary commented:- “Migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2010 from 2003 whilst not overly complex, is a manually intensive process. C2C themselves produce a valuable series of knowledge based articles detailing best practices on how to successfully migrate. However, it is not a ‘set and forget’ operation and you need to manually monitor mailboxes transitioning over; so reduced Information Stores are great news in terms of significantly cutting management overhead and time to migrate.”

The Result:
Now fully installed, The Donkey Sanctuary are thrilled that through widespread adoption, they have halved the size of the Exchange Information Store. ArchiveOne achieved this 50% reduction through use of its integral compression technology, together with The Donkey Sanctuary’s commitment and ability to delete unwanted email data at source and independently archive email messages and attachments. ArchiveOne then compresses the remaining attachments. The resultant reduction carries additional hardware savings extending and reducing the cost of expensive primary storage on their new Microsoft Exchange 2010 server. Thankfully, Andy also notes, the streamlined store also significantly reduces the migration time and resources required for the move to 2010.

Users at The Donkey Sanctuary can seamlessly access archived data from their Outlook folders, even when offline, simply by clicking on the Archive icon. Search and retrieval of emails is fulfilled confidently and takes seconds. Andy details the enhanced user confidence in the system. “Once users realise what the new process is and how watertight it is, they become more comfortable with total email management and thankfully, gone are the days when they felt the need to keep every email saved in random locations on their hard drive. They know that even if they mistakenly delete an archived message, we can locate it back from the integrated web-based search portal.”

At a management level, adoption of ArchiveOne has resonated positively towards demonstrating compliance to government legislation and defensible information management. Whilst requests for information disclosure are rare, as a large charity with over 500 employees, The Donkey Sanctuary is reassured that through ArchiveOne’s pre-assigned policies, management can now capture all email via journals. Delivered through a web based portal, officers within departments such as HR and legal support can ensure and demonstrate adherence with government regulations and enforce legal on-hold messages. Search, retention and deletion policies are all pre-set to manage data to fulfil e-Discovery requests.

Andy concludes: “Deploying ArchiveOne has provided us internally, across departments, with the ability to proactively monitor and prove adherence with corporate policies and fulfil governance and financial legislation requirements.”