Council archiving system tightens grip on email

Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council has installed an email archiving system and dramatically improved its grip on critical email, while easing the burden on over-stretched systems.

The council needed to get the system in place quickly to meet the requests for information from the public to meet forthcoming Freedom of Information Act regulations.

Rochdale opted for an email archiving system to provide better visibility of data, allowing it to access information from anywhere within its IT infrastructure.

Council systems operations manager Neville Johnson says the email project is vital in establishing policies for storing, accessing and retrieving all the council's data.

'This is an IT solution but, at the same time we are thinking about our policies,' he said.

Although the email archive project will result in better management of key data, Johnson says overburdened systems and ad-hoc storage processes were the initial motivation.

The council's existing Microsoft Exchange 5.5 server, catering for 5,000 users council-wide, supported the entire email system.

'Users were allowed to store PST files. Some users hadn't even emptied their deleted-email folders,' said Johnson.

'By archiving the emails, we can make the system far more secure as well, with built-in resilience including linking it into networked-attached storage technology.'

Archive software from vendor C2C Systems has already been deployed in a pilot phase to discover what files are stored on Rochdale's systems, and is now in the process of creating journal archives held in repositories.

This will keep old emails separate from active repositories available to users, providing a structure for storing and accessing data based on metadata criteria.