0-two Maintenance is a Retail Maintenance company based in Waterloo, London and was suffering from the classic small business e-mail overload problem. The management team had over 10 years of e-mail history stored in various Outlook archive folder (pst) files. These files had been chopped and changed over the years and were scattered across various local and shared folders on their computer systems. Even after some house-keeping to get them all in one location and accessible from Outlook, the data was so vast and disjointed that it was virtually impossible to locate an archived message stored within these files.

 

The company does a large majority of its business over e-mail and are obliged to keep all of their correspondence with clients and suppliers for reference. It is simply not an option to delete e-mail history and the accumulation of this data was increasingly impacting on the performance of their office server (which also runs their job tracking database) to the point that productivity was affected. When they needed to refer to correspondence that was not in their live mailboxes, large amounts of time was being wasted trawling through various archive folders trying to retrieve it, often without success.

 

A contributory factor to operating such an over-sized Microsoft Exchange email database is the increasing demands it puts on the data backup procedure. The larger a database becomes, the more difficult it is to make backups of it and the longer it would take to recover it in the event of a system failure or corruption. An exchange database that exceeds 20 gigabytes in size can take up to 2 days to repair and recover on an average small business server system. This risk of prolonged downtime of an e-mail system is one that few companies can afford in this day and age.

 

When ITbuilder was asked for a solution to this problem, we were prepared with Mailstore, an e-mail archiving application that was precisely what they needed. We set to work on a project to install Mailstore onto their office server, linking it into their Microsoft Exchange e-mail system and providing users with access to the database with the plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, their e-mail program of choice. Once the product was installed and working, we then set about the migration of years of e-mail history, importing a large number of archive files into the Mailstore database. The Microsoft Exchange and Mailstore databases were then tuned, optimized and configured with automatic archiving policies that move older messages from Exchange into Mailstore which continues to keep their live mail system trim and lean. The users were provided with tuition on how to archive and retrieve messages both using the plug-in for Outlook and the Web portal.

 

Mailstore has not only improved the performance of the office server, which before the project regularly ground to a halt due to the bloated mail database, it has enabled users to access any message no matter how old to be retrieved and referenced at the click of a mouse.

 

Company director, Nick Blyth, says: “Before ITbuilder offered the Mailstore solution, I could spend too long searching through archive folders for a message before having to give up. Now I can pull up any message in seconds, it’s just so fast. It really has made a difference to the way we work.”