Kirton & McConkie Ease E-mail Pains

Salt Lake City's Kirton & McConkie faced a critical communications issue. With 87 attorneys and additional support staff all using e-mail as a primary method to communicate with internal staff, clients, investigators and others essential to our cases, e-mail is the most important record for all types of data. We were using a backup product to perform a full database backup on the weekends, and incremental backups during the week on our Exchange server; however, the tape backup software didn't allow us to easily search and retrieve e-mail messages and attachments. Additionally, the need for large mailboxes (sometimes as big as 2 or 3 gigabytes), as well as increased e-mail activity, had caused our Exchange database to grow to an unmanageable 120 GB. We couldn't reduce e-mail service, as partners and staff relied on e-mail as the primary communications tool to handle cases. But, the risk of losing pertinent information was oppressive, and managing e-mail data and maintaining seamless access to archived information became a mission-critical task for IT services.

E-Mail Management

That's when we began the search for an e-mail management solution. We looked at several solutions, and found that Mimosa System's NearPoint was the only software solution that answered e-mail archiving, recovery and storage management requirements in one integrated package. NearPoint reduced e-mail storage, while offering a way to eliminate mailbox quotas. This was especially important, as we had adopted a 'save everything' e-mail policy and created 'super-sized' mailboxes. Restoring these messages and attachments was equally important. We were relying on disk-to-disk and tape backup, but restoring data from backup tapes could take up to 3 days. Fortunately, we have never experienced a catastrophic loss requiring full restoration of data, but we did have the need to restore individual messages or a string of messages. Although this was virtually impossible using the traditional tape backup solution, NearPoint could accomplish that in just minutes.

NearPoint didn't require us to install any agents on the server or client. This was key for two reasons: ease and speed of deployment; and no impact on the Exchange server to compromise performance. An added bonus was that we didn't need professional services to come in and set the whole thing up; it was simple from the beginning. With NearPoint deployed, we have been able to take full advantage of several key functions. Although it is completely transparent to the end users, NearPoint continuously archives all data in user mailboxes and public folders in near real time and stores it on the NearPoint server. This eliminates the need to impose mailbox quotas on any user and, in turn, eliminates the need for .PST files. Now, all of Kirton & McConkie's e-mail data is protected without impacting the firm's productivity. There is also no long 'backup window' because everything is captured in near real time. Before NearPoint, we were at risk of losing up to a week's worth of data; but now if the server were to go down or become corrupt, the potential for data loss is minimal. This gives everyone peace of mind.

Saving E-mails

The biggest storage hog at Kirton & McConkie has been huge attachments sent via e-mail. Before deploying NearPoint, Kirton & McConkie's Exchange database was around 120 GB. Now, with NearPoint Mailbox Extension, administrators define policies that allow mailboxes on the Exchange Servers to be extended to the NearPoint server. Messages are then migrated using parameters such as message size, age and mailbox size watermarks. Using these policies, NearPoint extracts the appropriate messages and attachments and replaces them with a stub file that points to the copy of the message residing on the NearPoint server. We've instituted policies that extract messages older than 30 days and larger than 500 KB. This has allowed us to 'shrink' the Exchange database by 100GB. Today, our Exchange database is an efficient 20 GB.

When a message has been extended, it still appears in the user's mailbox folder but is flagged with a different icon. Users still have completely seamless access to migrated messages. They simply double-click on the message to view, just as they would with any other message. They can also perform any 'normal' e-mail operations (such as forward, delete, reply and move) so that users still have the same experience with their mailbox while Kirton & McConkie is able to control the exponential storage growth theywere experiencing on production Exchange Servers. After compressing the Exchange databases, NearPoint's extended message technology not only reduced storage, but sped up Exchange performance as well.

Finding E-mails

IT often receives a request from an attorney or staff member asking to find  a specific e-mail or entire e-mail stringthat was mistakenly deleted. Again, this was difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. With NearPoint's Self- Service Access feature, all users can easily search and retrieve messages, calendar items, contacts, or tasks using a 'Google-like' keyword search that searches subject line, body and even attachments. What used to take almost a day's work to accomplish now takes minutes.

Additionally, auditors can be assigned access to multiple mailboxes, and through Outlook or Outlook Web Access, use the same simple search tools applied across the different mailboxes. By searching the 'To' and 'From' fields, as well as defining a time period for the search, auditors can achieve further search granularity, increasing efficiency of the e-discovery process. Auditors can also easily recreate a point-in-time communication between individuals. Allowing end users and auditors the ability to perform their own searches alleviates the burden on the system administrator and preserves privacy. We're in the process of granting 'auditor' roles to the partner's secretaries that will allow them to search and retrieve messages completely on their own.

Last year, we had an employee leave the firm. We deleted his entire mailbox, only to realize a few months later we needed some of the information contained in that mailbox. Doing this from tape backup was a very long and arduous process. If that need arises ever again, NearPoint makes it possible to restore a complete mailbox in just minutes.

E-mail Retention

Kirton & McConkie is working on retention policies. To this end, we plan to utilize NearPoint's retention management and disposition features. Two retention policies can be configured by the Exchange Administrator. The first retention policy manages all records in the archive based on the data protection period. With this policy, NearPoint automatically deletes records after an Administrator's specified period of time (for example, 30 days) after they've been deleted in Exchange. This is useful for material that is not required to be kept long term.

The second retention policy manages all records in the archive based on the compliance archiving retention period. This policy keeps records for as long (years) as defined by compliance standards, regardless of the action taken in the individual's mailbox, and then disposes them according to their creation day. This policy manages a company's e-mail policy when all e-mails must be retained for a period of time and then disposed. NearPoint allows both methods to be set independently at the mailbox, group or Exchange level.

With approximately 175 users at Kirton & McConkie now using NearPoint, we are realizing benefits across the organization, from reducing storage on Exchange, to allowing seamless user access to archived data, all while improving Exchange performance.

Salt Lake City's Kirton & McConkie faced a critical communications issue. With 87 attorneys and additional support staff all using e-mail as a primary method to communicate with internal staff, clients, investigators and others essential to our cases, e-mail is the most important record for all types of data. We were using a backup product to perform a full database backup on the weekends, and incremental backups during the week on our Exchange server; however, the tape backup software didn't allow us to easily search and retrieve e-mail messages and attachments. Additionally, the need for large mailboxes (sometimes as big as 2 or 3 gigabytes), as well as increased e-mail activity, had caused our Exchange database to grow to an unmanageable 120 GB. We couldn't reduce e-mail service, as partners and staff relied on e-mail as the primary communications tool to handle cases. But, the risk of losing pertinent information was oppressive, and managing e-mail data and maintaining seamless access to archived information became a mission-critical task for IT services.

E-Mail Management

That's when we began the search for an e-mail management solution. We looked at several solutions, and found that Mimosa System's NearPoint was the only software solution that answered e-mail archiving, recovery and storage management requirements in one integrated package. NearPoint reduced e-mail storage, while offering a way to eliminate mailbox quotas. This was especially important, as we had adopted a 'save everything' e-mail policy and created 'super-sized' mailboxes. Restoring these messages and attachments was equally important. We were relying on disk-to-disk and tape backup, but restoring data from backup tapes could take up to 3 days. Fortunately, we have never experienced a catastrophic loss requiring full restoration of data, but we did have the need to restore individual messages or a string of messages. Although this was virtually impossible using the traditional tape backup solution, NearPoint could accomplish that in just minutes.

NearPoint didn't require us to install any agents on the server or client. This was key for two reasons: ease and speed of deployment; and no impact on the Exchange server to compromise performance. An added bonus was that we didn't need professional services to come in and set the whole thing up; it was simple from the beginning. With NearPoint deployed, we have been able to take full advantage of several key functions. Although it is completely transparent to the end users, NearPoint continuously archives all data in user mailboxes and public folders in near real time and stores it on the NearPoint server. This eliminates the need to impose mailbox quotas on any user and, in turn, eliminates the need for .PST files. Now, all of Kirton & McConkie's e-mail data is protected without impacting the firm's productivity. There is also no long 'backup window' because everything is captured in near real time. Before NearPoint, we were at risk of losing up to a week's worth of data; but now if the server were to go down or become corrupt, the potential for data loss is minimal. This gives everyone peace of mind.

Saving E-mails

The biggest storage hog at Kirton & McConkie has been huge attachments sent via e-mail. Before deploying NearPoint, Kirton & McConkie's Exchange database was around 120 GB. Now, with NearPoint Mailbox Extension, administrators define policies that allow mailboxes on the Exchange Servers to be extended to the NearPoint server. Messages are then migrated using parameters such as message size, age and mailbox size watermarks. Using these policies, NearPoint extracts the appropriate messages and attachments and replaces them with a stub file that points to the copy of the message residing on the NearPoint server. We've instituted policies that extract messages older than 30 days and larger than 500 KB. This has allowed us to 'shrink' the Exchange database by 100GB. Today, our Exchange database is an efficient 20 GB.

When a message has been extended, it still appears in the user's mailbox folder but is flagged with a different icon. Users still have completely seamless access to migrated messages. They simply double-click on the message to view, just as they would with any other message. They can also perform any 'normal' e-mail operations (such as forward, delete, reply and move) so that users still have the same experience with their mailbox while Kirton & McConkie is able to control the exponential storage growth theywere experiencing on production Exchange Servers. After compressing the Exchange databases, NearPoint's extended message technology not only reduced storage, but sped up Exchange performance as well.

Finding E-mails

IT often receives a request from an attorney or staff member asking to find  a specific e-mail or entire e-mail stringthat was mistakenly deleted. Again, this was difficult and time-consuming to accomplish. With NearPoint's Self- Service Access feature, all users can easily search and retrieve messages, calendar items, contacts, or tasks using a 'Google-like' keyword search that searches subject line, body and even attachments. What used to take almost a day's work to accomplish now takes minutes.

Additionally, auditors can be assigned access to multiple mailboxes, and through Outlook or Outlook Web Access, use the same simple search tools applied across the different mailboxes. By searching the 'To' and 'From' fields, as well as defining a time period for the search, auditors can achieve further search granularity, increasing efficiency of the e-discovery process. Auditors can also easily recreate a point-in-time communication between individuals. Allowing end users and auditors the ability to perform their own searches alleviates the burden on the system administrator and preserves privacy. We're in the process of granting 'auditor' roles to the partner's secretaries that will allow them to search and retrieve messages completely on their own.

Last year, we had an employee leave the firm. We deleted his entire mailbox, only to realize a few months later we needed some of the information contained in that mailbox. Doing this from tape backup was a very long and arduous process. If that need arises ever again, NearPoint makes it possible to restore a complete mailbox in just minutes.

E-mail Retention

Kirton & McConkie is working on retention policies. To this end, we plan to utilize NearPoint's retention management and disposition features. Two retention policies can be configured by the Exchange Administrator. The first retention policy manages all records in the archive based on the data protection period. With this policy, NearPoint automatically deletes records after an Administrator's specified period of time (for example, 30 days) after they've been deleted in Exchange. This is useful for material that is not required to be kept long term.

The second retention policy manages all records in the archive based on the compliance archiving retention period. This policy keeps records for as long (years) as defined by compliance standards, regardless of the action taken in the individual's mailbox, and then disposes them according to their creation day. This policy manages a company's e-mail policy when all e-mails must be retained for a period of time and then disposed. NearPoint allows both methods to be set independently at the mailbox, group or Exchange level.

With approximately 175 users at Kirton & McConkie now using NearPoint, we are realizing benefits across the organization, from reducing storage on Exchange, to allowing seamless user access to archived data, all while improving Exchange performance.