Wirral Partnership Homes

Wirral Partnership Homes took over the ownership and management of Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council's 13,320 homes in 2005. Over the past year, staff at Wirral Partnership Homes have been working hard to deliver the £150 million investment in the transfer programme. As part of this effort, the Wirral Partnership IT team has ensured new IT systems were in place to deal with the resulting administration issues.

Like many housing associations, Wirral Partnership Homes has seen email become a key method of internal communication, as well as with external parties such as tenants and contractors. The level of email administration has increased accordingly - the everyday volume of message data, plus the amount of legacy email contained in tape archives and end users' PST files presented the Wirral Partnership IT team with a number of significant challenges.

Wirral Partnership Homes decided to take preventative action to avoid problems with storage of message data in the long term. Previously, the Wirral Partnership IT team had controlled the size of users' mailboxes by the use of quotas (50Mb warning, 70Mb limit). Although this restricted the growth of email data, it created a significant IT problem as users who exceeded their quota could not send or receive email. This issue generated an excessive amount of IT help desk calls. Users were forced to delete emails or archive to local storage in order to reduce the number of messages in their mailbox. Consequently, a large number of users either relied on Outlook PST files to store older emails or permanently deleted emails that could have had some importance in the future.

The problem of limited message data storage also meant that the Wirral Partnership IT team was unable to take advantage of email journaling, despite the business need to capture email messages for audit purposes. After the merger, Wirral Partnership Homes realised that an email archiving solution was a priority as it would eliminate many of the IT problems associated with the management of email storage.

Why Enterprise Vault?

Wirral Partnership Homes chose Symantec Enterprise Vault as it is currently the market leading email archiving solution*. With over 1,500 customers, its scalability has already been proven by a number of very large deployments (organisations with over 100,000 mailboxes).

* Source: Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active-Archiving Market (May 12, 2006)

In addition to email archiving, Enterprise Vault also facilitates a long term archiving strategy by enabling data to be archived from IT platforms such as file systems and instant messaging. Data can even be archived from other information systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum and SAP. Ultimately, Enterprise Vault can provide a single archiving solution for all corporate information and is designed for long term data retention.

Archiving and Information Management

Following a pre-sales consultation with Phoenix Software, including a product demonstration and technical analysis, Wirral Partnership Homes engaged Phoenix to design and deliver an email archiving solution using Enterprise Vault.

The technical analysis provided by Phoenix Software clearly identified that the following core functionality was required from an implementation of Enterprise Vault.

Managing Mailbox Growth
Enterprise Vault enables archiving of data stored in Exchange mailboxes, journals, public folders and PST files. It was clear that Wirral Partnership Homes would benefit from mailbox archiving as removing data from the primary message store would improve the performance and management of their Exchange server, and email data growth could be controlled through the use of archiving policies.

Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archiving takes data from individual mailboxes in Microsoft Exchange and moves it to less expensive storage. Business rules can be defined that automatically move emails and attachments out of Exchange and into the archive at specific intervals, for example 'emails older than 3 months' and/or 'emails over 1,024KB'. Optionally, shortcuts or 'stubs' are left behind in Exchange allowing users easily to view archived items transparently through Microsoft Outlook or via a Web-based search tool.

Further business rules can be expressed as retention categories which determine how long email data is held in the archive, and are aligned to business functions, for example 'HR emails are held for 3 years' and 'Finance emails are held for 7 years'. Enterprise Vault uses compression and single-instancing techniques that can dramatically reduce storage requirements in the long term.

The Problem with PST Files
Wirral Partnership Homes were experiencing a number of problems with the widespread use of PST (Personal STorage) files. PST files are created by Microsoft Outlook to store information locally on the user's PC, but they are designed for small volumes of email. From a business perspective, PST files were problematic as the Wirral Partnership IT team were unable to safely manage users' emails - the deletion or corruption of a user's PST files would have resulted in the loss of potentially vital business information.

The migration of PST files on to a network server would not have been a viable solution as PST files are designed to be stored on a local computer; Microsoft publicly states that they do not support the use of PST files stored and used across a network. In addition, the Wirral Partnership IT team disliked PST files as they had a major impact on network backups due to their large file size.

Enterprise Vault's PST Migrator tool is able to search the network for PST files and move email messages to its central vault store. After emails are moved, the original PST file can be compressed, hidden or deleted. It is also possible to disable the auto-archive feature in Microsoft Outlook to prevent the creation of further PST files.

Auditing Email
The journaling feature of Microsoft Exchange collects a copy of every message that passes through the email system and places it into a designated mailbox that the user cannot access. Enterprise Vault's Journal Archiving module is able to sweep that mailbox on a regular basis throughout the day and move emails into its archive store. Unlike mailbox archiving, this feature of Enterprise Vault does not create shortcuts and does not follow any schedule or policies - emails are moved as soon as they are found in the journal mailbox.

As a consequence of consolidating email storage via mailbox archiving, Wirral Partnership Homes could start to benefit from using Enterprise Vault Journal Archiving, by creating a central 'tamperproof' repository from where email can be easily monitored and retrieved. Organisations with legal or compliance requirements for email archiving are the primary users of this feature.

The Phoenix Solution

The technical implementation of Enterprise Vault was completed by Phoenix consultants over a three-day period, with zero impact to end users. The product installation was completed in two days - a further day was spent conducting a technical handover to the Wirral Partnership IT team.

A dedicated Enterprise Vault server was installed to perform the archiving operations, with all archived email stored on a separate Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database server. Two archive databases (known as 'Vault Stores') were created to manage users' emails, including all data imported from users' PST files and emails archived via the journaling feature. A phased deployment approach was taken whereby Enterprise Vault was introduced to one group of users each week. The installation of a small client plug-in for Microsoft Outlook was required for each user's PC.

Defining Policies
Wirral Partnership Homes decided to apply a standard age-based policy to archive all email over one month old. It was also decided that emails over 3Mb in size should be archived immediately, to benefit from compression and single instance storage of emails with large file attachments. A single retention category is currently in place to retain all email indefinitely.

Eliminating PST files
The migration of PST files involved a three-step process. Firstly, Enterprise Vault was configured to locate PST files based on a scan of the network, as well as the registry settings of each user's PC. File ownership was automatically detected based on the mailbox it was associated with in Microsoft Outlook.

Once the search was complete, the second step was to collect the PST files and move them into a temporary location while still in PST format. This ensured that data was still accessible by users during the migration and provided the opportunity to perform a final backup of PST files prior to migration.

The third and final step was to move data from PST files into the Enterprise Vault store - once migration was complete, a policy was applied to delete the original PST file. Users are able to access emails previously held in their PST files via specially created folders in Outlook.

The Enterprise Vault Journaling feature was implemented at Wirral Partnership Homes to assist with the capture and retention of all electronic records, including emails, which may be required in the future. For example, emails from tenants that may have future relevance to a legal dispute or complaint process are now held as records in a central archive provided by Enterprise Vault. Emails that have been archived by the journaling feature cannot be deleted by the end user.

Benefits

Wirral Partnership Homes has already seen impressive benefits from the implementation of Enterprise Vault by Phoenix Software. These benefits go beyond the improved management of users' mailboxes and reduced storage requirements for Exchange, and include the following:

• By providing an 'infinite mailbox', IT help desk calls regarding end user email quotas have been reduced to nil
• The administration time this has saved can be claimed by the IT team as a cost saving in their Annual Efficiency Statement to management
• Users have quickly benefited from improved performance and access to emails
• Users are no longer dependent on the use of PST files to store emails locally
• All email previously contained in PST files is now held in a single, central store from where messages can be quickly and easily retrieved
• Journaling has enabled better readiness for future compliance requirements by capturing all email in a tamper proof repository
• Assuming an average 10% annual growth in email data, the Wirral Partnership IT team predict that they will not need to purchase additional email storage for a number of years

Finally, with Enterprise Vault, Wirral Partnership Homes will benefit from a long term archiving strategy as data can be archived from future IT platforms by the implementation of additional modules. Phoenix technical consultants are able to fully support the implementation of Enterprise Vault as Wirral Partnership Homes move forward with a long term policy for data archiving.

"The implementation of Enterprise Vault provides Wirral Partnership Homes with a future-proof solution to deal with the growth of email data, as well as enabling us to comply with legal compliance for any disclosure of information. The implementation process was very smooth and straight forward due in part to the technical expertise of Phoenix staff, the project management and the simplicity of the product for our end users"
Gordon Flack, IT Manager, Wirral Partnership Homes