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  IM@T Online September 2004
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Thomas Miller ensures its e-mail is shipshape when it comes to complianceInsurance services firm selects Legato Software’s E-MailXtender to meet UK data retention demands effectively
The company is the world leader in providing insurance solutions to the international shipping and transport industry. The insurance businesses that it manages provide insurance to many of the industry leaders, including the owners of 20 per cent of the world's deep sea tonnage as well as most of the world's leading container operators, freight forwarders, container terminal operators, ships agents and ship brokers. The service provided is delivered through a network of officers located in all the major time zones.
The business issues A key area of concern was the safe, efficient storage of electronic communications, especially e-mail. A legal obligation to keep all e-mail for seven years even return receipts meant e-mail management was a serious challenge for the IT department. Increasing mail volumes were proving costly and slowed e-mail systems down significantly. Thomas Miller turned to Integritis, a specialist messaging consultancy, for suggestions, and after very successful pilot projects Legato Software’s E-mailXtender solution was selected to automate its e-mail management. "We have some people with over 30,000 e-mails in their mailboxes," stated Richard Lewin, IT Services Manager at Thomas Miller. This highlights the scale of the organisations' e-mail storage problem. "Whilst internal policies on e-mail 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 was a problem faced equally by all its international offices and the costs of storage for e-mail alone was becoming unacceptably high. But as all e-mails have to be kept for compliance purposes, deletion was not an option and - due to regulations relating to retrieval of e-mail archival was rapidly becoming a business critical issue. IT staff were also spending considerable amounts of time retrieving ‘lost’ e-mails, because the high number of e-mails in each mailbox meant staff couldn’t always find the information they needed. The standard e-mail archiving and search functions were simply not advanced enough to deal with such large mailboxes and ran incredibly slowly as a result. "We use Lotus Notes across all our entire enterprise," continued Lewin. "But because of the amount of e-mail generated, all of which we then have to keep in some way, a lot of Notes administrator time was required to manage the situation. In addition, the Lotus archiving function isn’t very efficient for the size of mailboxes we have to deal with. That said we are very happy with the product and had no desire to change. But when we looked to migrate from Lotus 4 to Lotus 6 that we realised we had to take action," he said.
E-mailXtender centralises and automates the storage and retrieval of e-mail, reducing management time and making it easier and faster to administer. Using E-mailXtender IT management can set ‘rules’ that determine how, when and which e-mails are archived automatically by the system. As a result less e-mail is kept in mailboxes on the mail server so storage costs and backup times are reduced. All incoming and outgoing e-mail is captured and indexed enabling very fast retrieval and search functions. "The E-mailXtender 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. The business benefits One reason for such a huge saving was the way E-mailXtender 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 e-mail with an attachment was sent to three people within Thomas Miller, three copies of the message and attachment were stored. E-mailXtender stores the message and attachment once and provides a link to the single mail to each of the three people. From the user’s perspective, however, there is no difference in how quickly they can find and open either the e-mail or the attachment. Additionally, the solution enables users to search across both e-mails and attachments, something that is not possible with Lotus Notes on its own, enabling faster retrieval of information. "The E-mailXtender search function is so easy to install non technical staff can do it themselves, so not only is IT not having to retrieve whole mailboxes just to find one e-mail but they don’t even have to help employees get going themselves," said Lewin, "And because every e-mail going in or out, or even internally, is trapped, stored and indexed now we have a record even if an employee deletes it off of their mailbox which gives us an additional layer of security and compliance that is very important," he added. Extending the pilot, Legato and Integritis conducted a server installation for E-mailXtender and the software was run out across live users from different departments who had agreed to be test subjects. There were no issues in implementing the system and feedback from the test subjects was very positive. As a result the company decided on a full-scale deployment of the software, and purchased 700 licenses, 450 of which are for the London office that acts as the central e-mail hub for the organisation. The pilot proved a useful tool for the technical teams to recommend backup and archival schedules. "We now archive any files that are older than 365 days," said Lewin. "Although we will probably reduce that even further. Every day all files that fall into that category are archived automatically reducing pressure on the servers without any input from IT. And we archive the e-mail and attachment for legal reasons," he continued. Backup times have been significantly reduced as a result and the savings on storage have also been impressive. The amount of ‘internal junk’ e-mail (to quote Lewin) has also significantly reduced now staff are aware their e-mail is monitored! However, crucially Thomas Miller has now got an e-mail system in place that ensures it can comply with any legal requests or queries in the future, protecting its reputation, its value and its staff. Legato Systems UK, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Histon, Cambridge, CB4 9AD. Tel: 01223-257778; fax: 01223-257789; www.legato.com Thomas Miller and Co. Ltd, International House, 26 Creechurch Lane, London EC3A 5BA. Tel: 020 7283 4646; www.thomasmiller.com/ IM@T Online September 2004
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THOMAS
MILLER is a privately owned group of companies providing a full
range of insurance and risk management services. Thomas Miller is best
known for its management of mutual insurance companies in the international
transport sector. It also manages a number of UK-based specialist insurance
companies and has interests in a number of other companies servicing the
same market place. 
In
2002 the Marine and Transport businesses of Thomas Miller were granted
certification under the new international standard for quality management
systems ISO: 9001 (2000). This standard is designed to ensure that companies
focus their management systems on meeting the needs and service requirements
of customers. 
The
solution