As an organisation dealing in insurance - one of the most tightly regulated markets in terms of compliance and data retention - management of information is a high priority for the Thomas Miller organisation. Its key priority was the establishment of a safe, efficient storage system for its electronic communications, especially email. A legal requirement to keep all email for seven years - even return receipts - also meant email management was becoming a serious challenge for the IT department.

Increasing mail volumes were proving costly and slowed email systems down significantly. Thomas Miller turned to LEGATO channel partner Integritis, a specialist messaging consultancy, for suggestions and after successful pilot projects LEGATO Software's EmailXtender solution was selected to automate its email management on its three pairs of Lotus Domino 5 HP/Compaq mail servers.

A team from LEGATO and Integritis examined Thomas Miller's storage resource and infrastructure, estimating the savings that could be made. Integritis also worked with Thomas Miller to define its policies on email archival and its retention strategies with a particular emphasis on legal compliance and corporate governance. Part of this process involved an initial pilot of the software, running tests across three mailboxes. This confirmed the amount of email that could be archived off and showed that 46% of Thomas Miller's storage costs could be saved through this process alone.

"We have some people with over 30,000 emails in their mailboxes," stated Richard Lewin, Desktop Services Manager at Thomas Miller. This highlights the scale of the organisations' email storage problem. "Whilst internal policies on email management and retention had been put in place, they had met with little success and we were frequently having to buy more disks just to cope with increasing mail volumes."

IT staff were also spending considerable amounts of time retrieving 'lost' emails, because the high number of emails in each mailbox meant staff couldn't always find the information they needed. The standard email archiving and search functions were simply not advanced enough to deal with such large mailboxes and ran incredibly slowly as a result.

Using EmailXtender, Thomas Miller now centralises and automates the storage and retrieval of email, reducing management time and making it easier and faster to administer. Using EmailXtender, IT management set 'rules' that determine how, when and which emails are archived automatically by the system.

As a result, less email is kept in mailboxes on the mail server, reducing storage costs and backup times. All incoming and outgoing email is captured and indexed enabling very fast retrieval and search functions.

"The EmailXtender solution is very easy to use and delivers everything Thomas Miller requires in terms of archival, retrieval of archived files and auditing. It enables them to meet legal compliance, which is a key issue for a company dealing in insurance, but it can also manage the archival of instant messaging - something that Thomas Miller were very keen to have and saw as a significant benefit," said Denise Bryant, Sales Director at Integritis.

One reason for such a huge saving was the way EmailXtender manages attachments and enables access to archived files. Attachments are a major drain on storage resource because Domino stores messages with attachments sent to multiple users, more than once. Therefore if an email with an attachment was sent to three people within Thomas Miller, three copies of the message and attachment were stored. EmailXtender stores the message and attachment once and provides a link to the single mail to each of the three people.

Backup times have also been significantly reduced as a result and the savings on storage have also been impressive. However, Thomas Miller now got an email system in place that ensures it complies with legal requests or queries in the future, protecting its reputation, its value and its staff.