The Liburdi Group
The Liburdi Group of Companies provides the latest technologies and services through offices and plants located in Canada, the United States and Europe.
Environment:
- Exchange system reaching volume limits
- Central HQ and travelling employees needing continuous access to email
Personal storage files (PST) didn’t solve capacity issues at the Liburdi Group. “We found that the default Microsoft archiving ability in Outlook does not have great administrative ability,” explains Bill Wallace, IT Technologist. “You cannot control, from the top level down, where PST files were being generated, how the files are named and when those names will change. If we did nothing about it, we would exceed the individual 2GB PST file size limit. Trying to maintain the archiving interval with group policy is extremely inaccurate. The rate of e-mail growth was dramatically close to the overall Exchange server limit of 16GB. In 5 to 10 years, users would have 5 to 10 archive files or more. This was not a very efficient or easy system!”
Some Liburdi employees were good about deleting unnecessary e-mails. Others, such as engineers, kept every legitimate business query and answer. To start recapturing lost storage space in Exchange, Wallace moved all PST files to a server for easier management and tape back-up ability, setting them up manually for each person. But it was time consuming for the IT staff to visit each desktop.
“We even tried setting quotas on mailboxes, but each user needed a different limit and the heavier e-mail users would often get warnings regularly,” says Wallace. “The solution to that was to keep increasing the limit — which solved nothing. People just get frustrated and start deleting whether good or bad.”
Liburdi bought Archive One Policy to reduce and manage their Exchange stores. Employees immediately noticed a difference — Wallace was no longer visiting their desks to manually move their PST files to a server and the quota e-mails stopped.
“Archive One Policy gives them virtually unlimited storage space,” says Wallace. “It allows them to keep all their e-mails in one location in Outlook and now it is accessible remotely. With a fairly large traveling employee base and customers from North America to Europe to the Far East, it’s a huge bonus to be able to have all that previously inaccessible e-mail available remotely again. That ability alone pays for the system.”
Wallace noticed a difference, too. “We saved about 30 man hours a month. There’s so much more we can do with Archive One Policy, and we plan to have this system in place for the next 10 to 20 years.”