Fast-growing city selects content archiving to manage e-mail data

Located in northeast Kansas, Lenexa has experienced a 15 percent growth in population since 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Lenexa Planning and Development Department.

As in most growing cities today, the majority of the city's business applications require e-mail. City employees relied on the Microsoft Exchange platform, which was a vital part of the city’s e-mail and communications infrastructure.

Just as the city’s population has skyrocketed, so was the volume of e-mail transmitted across the Lenexa network. Some city employees retained historical e-mail dating back to 1989, causing e-mail volume to reach unmanageable proportions.

Adding to the e-mail volume was a drive to go “paperless” initiated in the 1990s. Despite numerous cleanup campaigns initiated by the city's IT department, users continued to save all their historical e-mails in local files, which started to experience corruption and monopolized costly storage space on file shares, desktops and laptops.

“We tried massive cleanup campaigns and even gave prizes for cleaning mail repositories,” said Mike Lawrence, senior network administrator with the city of Lenexa. “This worked for a while, but we needed a better way to manage the volume. We had to quickly get ahead of the curve because large mail-stores were causing operational problems.”

Evaluating technology

City officials evaluated a number of solutions to manage and safeguard e-mail data. Based on various factors, including the need for continuous protection of Exchange information, officials selected NearPoint, a content archiving solution.

Developed by Mimosa Systems Inc., based in Santa Clara, Calif., NearPoint combines features to manage e-mail information, archive data, meet regulatory requirements, optimize storage space and ensure business continuity of operations. NearPoint technology preserves all Exchange e-mail information, allows users to restore individual messages themselves via Outlook and enables administrators to restore complete mailboxes and databases with simple “one-click” operations.

Other benefits of NearPoint include:

• Continuous capture and archiving of Exchange data, including all metadata, e-mails, folders, deletions, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks to quickly identify relevant content as part of a discovery or disclosure request.

• Automated Exchange storage management. NearPoint can reduce a city's storage requirements by moving attachments, based on policies of age and size, to a companion server. A Mailbox Extension feature allows Lenexa's IT staff to define policies governing e-mail attachments in Exchange, while still giving users seamless access to the e-mail.

“Mimosa NearPoint will allow us to dramatically reduce mailbox size, while assuring users they still have continuous access to e-mail information,” Lawrence said. “And it's comforting to know that, if we lose Exchange, we can restore files with one click. I sleep better at night.”

In addition, the city of Safety Harbor, Fla., located near Tampa, implemented NearPoint to handle its constantly growing e-mail volume and ensure data recovery in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster. NearPoint helped city officials comply with Florida’s Public Records and Sunshine Laws, which mandate that all Florida municipalities and government agencies retain and provide access to public records, including e-mail data.

For more information about Mimosa NearPoint and other information management solutions, including details about a free handbook, E-mail Archiving for Dummies, visit http://www.MimosaSystems.com/.