Colorado Community College System Reduces Storage Costs, Eliminates PSTs and Simplifies Email Retention Management with Metalogix

THE CHALLENGE

With more than 16,000 mailboxes under management, the CCCS needed to implement an email retention policy that would streamline email data protection and eliminate strain on its IT support team. At the time, each college was managing its own server and the personal email files, or PST folders, were creating major challenges for the IT staff. The PST folders were prone to corruption and repair times were becoming a consistent drain on the CCCS IT staff’s time.

“When we decided to centralize our Exchange server and move data to a central office, we knew we needed to implement an email archiving solution at the same time,” said Chuck Locy, assistant administrator, CCCS. “We needed to get rid of PST folders and save space on our file servers. Ultimately, we didn’t want to worry about repairing corrupted PST folders any more. We also needed a way to manage email data, so we could automatically purge information when it was no longer required so we didn’t keep everything.”

For CCCS, the key criteria for an email archiving solution included ease of use and cost efficiency. The most important criteria, though, was the ability to easily set policies to align with data retention requirements and eliminate troublesome PST folders.

“As a government agency, budget is always a factor,” said Locy. “We needed a solution that was affordable but also user-friendly and easy for our IT department to manage; one that didn’t require a significant amount of training. That’s where Metalogix shined. You can set and forget email retention policies and they are handled automatically. Email archiving is transparent to the end users and completely automated without them needing to learn a new procedure or policy.”

THE SOLUTION

After evaluating several options, CCCS selected Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange, which delivered a superior combination of ease of use, full enterprise-class features and cost efficiency for many users. It enabled CCCS to eliminate troublesome PST files while still giving end users the complete access they wanted to past email data.

“Before using Metalogix, all colleges were managing their own servers,” said Locy. “But that became a costly and time-consuming process. “With Metalogix Archive Manager, our mailboxes are now under control. We’ve eliminated PST files, so our end users don’t have to manage them any longer. The Metalogix Archive Manager restore feature allows our IT department to quickly restore their files making it much easier for all of us to manage and dispose of email once it’s no longer needed. As a result, we can devote much needed resources to other critical areas.”

Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange enables CCCS to eliminate the cost associated with sprawling storage and server infrastructure across its 22 campus environments while providing comprehensive management of granular email retention policies. The solution archives everything that is processed through the email system and makes the restore process much faster and easier. When users delete mails from Exchange, these mails can easily be found in the archive and restored as shortcuts back to Exchange for access in Outlook and OWA or found by users themselves via the Archive Manager Archive Web client, a web-based console that allows users to view archived mail on a browser on a PC or smart-phone, without IT assistance. The community college now archives its email data on SAN storage, running on a blade system through VMware.

THE RESULTS

Metalogix Archive Manager for Exchange was installed and running in under a day and has proved to be the solution CCCS desperately needed for overall email management and storage optimization. With advanced features for policy management and email retention, Metalogix Archive Manger delivers the robust functionality CCCS required, along with the ease of use that will foster long term adoption and success.

“We are very happy with Metalogix Archive Manager... It’s helped us consolidate our exchange environment from 22 servers to 3 and helped us reduce our archive storage requirements by 75%, which has resulted in reduced costs and improved customer satisfaction. All of our users are happy now.”