ICL installs KVS e-mail management software

In line with the compliancy requirements of the ECT Act, ICL has selected KVS Enterprise Vault as its internal e-mail management solution. KVS Enterprise Vault is an e-mail archiving solution for managing archiving, retention and retrieval of documents and electronic mail messages for Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint Portal Server.

"E-mail management is becoming a major problem in every organisation, from SMEs to large corporates," explains ICL operations director Mike Semple.

With both the volume and size of e-mails on the increase, ICL`s e-mail files were growing exponentially, making information difficult to organise. This was putting ICL`s IT infrastructure under stress.

"Storing e-mails on individual PCs takes up disk space and time to manage. We couldn`t leave it up to employees to manage and archive information that potentially could be important for legal purposes," says Semple.

In addition, the limit in mailbox size per user started causing havoc and users where being continually requested to clean out their mailboxes, a time-consuming task that often led to valuable information being deleted in haste.

"The window for backing up Microsoft Exchange Server each day was also becoming longer and longer as data increased in size," says Semple, "causing delays in users being able to access their mailboxes."

In terms of Exchange Server, it was reaching full capacity with the increase in the average size of PST files leading to corruption. With this came the growing need for ICL to increase its infrastructure size.

Around all this, ICL needed to comply with the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 (ECT Act), which required certain business-related e-mails to be retained for a period of up to five years. "Currently utilising the Exchange system alone would not allow ICL to do this efficiently," notes Semple.

"We were looking for a solution that would meet all these needs as well as provide functionality such as journaling and audit trails that would be legally valid if contested in court," he adds.

"Within ICL, like all other companies today, we were wanting to reducing the number of servers installed in a drive to reduce maintenance and support costs. For an organisation of our size this would result in real cost savings that could be ploughed back into the business," says Semple.

One of the key decision criteria was stability. E-mail messaging and collaboration has become a vital business tool. "Because ICL plans to grow as an organisation over the next five years, we needed to ensure that our Exchange system is made more reliable and stable, and that we have the ability to efficiently predict and manage storage growth."

"KVS Enterprise Vault was our choice because it could assist ICL in complying with all these needs and with the requirements of the ECT Act 2002," explains Semple.

Other drivers in selecting KVS Enterprise Vault where the elimination of PST Folders.

"ICL is the Channel Development Partner for KVS Enterprise Vault in SA. So what better way to find out about the merits and drawbacks of KVS Enterprise Vault than to install the software throughout ICL South Africa. KVS is a global partner for a number of strategic vendors, such as EMC, Compaq, Microsoft and Fujitsu Services," notes Semple.

"KVS has a formidable track record and reference base throughout Europe and the UK, and KVS Enterprise Vault could integrate with ICL`s current Microsoft infrastructure," he adds.

A project team was established to manage the installation and roll-out of KVS Enterprise Vault throughout ICL`s offices in SA. The project team consisted of ICL`s internal IT administrators and ICL engineers who are qualified to handle the KVS installation.

The first step was to confirm what components of KVS Enterprise Vault, besides the server licence and mailbox licences, ICL would require:

Policy manager - required in order to implement the different policies such as archiving policy, retention policy etc.

PST Migrator - used to move e-mails from the user`s personal files sitting either on the user`s desktop or on a server into the Vault.

Offline Vault - Important to ICL that we have this component because many of our mobile users require access to their archived e-mails when not connected to the ICL network. Next, policies needed to be established and agreed to by management of the various business units within ICL SA with regards to:

Archiving Policy - This defines the age of mail items before they get archived into the vault.

Shortcut deletion - This avoid mailboxes being clattered by old shortcuts, a policy can be set to automatically delete shortcuts out of the users` mailboxes.

The archived e-mail will still be in the vault even though the shortcut has been deleted and users can access those e-mails by using the Alta Vista empowered search engine.

Retention policy - Determines how long archived e-mails will be kept in the vault before they are deleted from the system.

Backup and archiving schedule - A schedule with regards to when archiving and backup should take place.

A pilot group of 20 users were identified for phase one of the roll-out over a period of a week, to ensure that the installation team had covered all issues that might arise. Thereafter KVS was rolled out throughout the regions over a period of two weeks.

User training was simple and uncomplicated and regular communications were sent out to all employees before the roll-out even commenced advising them of the proposed installation, why ICL was installing KVS, what KVS is and how it would affect them. Thus KVS was more readily accepted without trepidation.

The benefits include:

* Protection of personal and corporate knowledge assets
* Knowledge exploitation - the ability to quickly search and retrieve with ease information stored in the Vault as opposed to searching for PST files
* Provision of a secure centralised archive in which e-mails are stored
* Elimination of PST files which cause storage proliferation
* "Unlimited" mailboxes - no more constant reminders for staff to clear their inboxes because they have exceeded their allocated size
* Reduction in Exchange Server message store by 50%
* Reduction in time to back up and restore Exchange
* Better management of the Exchange environment
* Ease of migration to Exchange 2003 when the time arises

ICL has a team of engineers who are qualified to install KVS and consultants from KVS in the UK where at hand at all times to assist with any problems that may have been experienced.

Furthermore, ICL being part of Fujitsu Services, one of KVS`s most strategic global partners, was assured of additional support should the need arise.

Semple says rolling out to a pilot group of users, specifically including those who are not too "computer literate" was the way to go as ICL picked up various concerns and queries that assisted in rolling out to the remaining users countrywide.

"KVS operates on the basis that e-mails are stored on a central server, no longer taking up unnecessary disk space on individual PCs. Archiving is done automatically," adds Michael Ross, chief technology officer of the ICL Solutions Business Unit.

"The software now enables us to set up automatic archiving policies that are transparent to the user, saving an enormous amount of time on user administration," he says. "It is easier to manage data centrally, and there is no hardware cost involved because existing hardware can be used."

KVS Enterprise Vault will also help ICL reduce the data migration costs and timescales for the planned migration from Exchange 5.5 to 2000. By using the Vault to archive older items and so reduce the Exchange message store size, the time to move the information, potentially a significant and expensive period, can be correspondingly reduced.

Furthermore, by shrinking mailbox sizes and consequently enabling their growth to be kept under control, it is possible to maximise the number of users that can realistically be supported on the Exchange 2000 system, thereby optimising the system consolidation opportunity.

"We believe that Enterprise Vault is the market`s most comprehensive corporate e-mail management system that addresses the problems arising from the ongoing proliferation of unstructured information, in particular e-mail. Enterprise Vault provides key features such as automatic, policy-driven mailbox and public folder archiving, PST import, and mandatory journaled mail retention," Semple concludes.