Case Study

Erie 1 BOCES

Erie 1 BOCES Education Service Center standardizes on MailMeter for Email Archiving. Background: Erie 1 BOCES serves 67,871 students in 19 districts surrounding the city of Buffalo, New York. Erie 1 BOCES has a strong commitment to its constituents

19
Districts

67,871
Students

Email Archiving and Data Management

“The installation was done in less than a day and there was no need for any consulting on-site services. The entire process was done remotely, which was another reason why we selected Waterford Technologies MailMeter.”

Dave Kajdasz, Supervisor,
Email and Electronic Forms Service Team,
Erie 1 BOCES

CHALLENGE

Erie 1 started receiving increasing requests from their schools for assistance in finding emails to support internal HR and external legal queries and investigations. As emails are increasingly required as supporting evidence, Erie 1 BOCES realized that these requests would grow significantly over time, especially in regards to public records requests under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). Erie 1 BOCES realized the back-ups that schools were currently relying on, were only snapshots and representing a point in time, making it extremely difficult to manage and search as they are were an incomplete email record.

Working with multiple email platforms presents a unique set of challenges for most vendors, so Erie 1 BOCES set about trying to identify a vendor that could meet this unique challenge.

REQUIREMENTS

A user friendly and intuitive solution that is accessible by students, HR, IT and Compliance teams.
Ideally provide a clientless solution to minimize installation timeframes and impact.
An email compliance solution to assist with FOIA and internal eDiscovery requests.
The solution must be able to work across multiple email platforms.
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SOLUTION

After an extensive review of 10 vendors, they chose MailMeter by Waterford Technologies as the best solution to meet the challenges of their schools, while providing a completely managed support service.

Erie 1 BOCES decided to deploy MailMeter internally first ahead of recommending it to schools. Erie 1 BOCES was impressed by the fact that it took less than a day to deploy and very little on-site training was required.

“After running MailMeter for a while, we realized that the solution really was as simple and easy as it was represented to be – no hidden gotchas.“
Dave Kajdasz, Supervisor, Email and Electronic Forms Service Team,
Erie 1 BOCES

Erie 1 BOCES initially were concerned about supporting internal and external legal requests for emails but soon realized that with the ISR (Individual Search) and Investigate (Organization wide) features offered, they could leverage one archive for both purposes.

Because MailMeter captures data real-time and can pull in historical data, they felt secure knowing that they had a copy of every email. They decided to implement a new rule to keep the servers small and only keep 18 months on the mail server. After that time they implemented a rule to automatically delete email. With the browser based ISR interface, users can easily find their old email and forward a copy back to themselves. In Dave’s words, it has a “Google search type functionality.” This functionality is available for all platforms and environments, allowing real-time capture, import from the email server, and the ability to import individual PST archive files into the central MailMeter Archive repository.

Over the last few years, Erie 1 BOCES Western New York Regional Information Center has rolled out MailMeter to around 40 different schools on multiple email platforms. The largest school is over 6,000 mailboxes proving that MailMeter definitely scales to larger installations.

Benefits

By using MailMeter, Erie 1 BOCES can be confident that the schools they support can quickly find data in the event of any legal request or reason. About half of the requests (50%) are for internal HR issues with a quarter (25%) of those requests coming from external FOIA or public records requests. Not all of the schools have had an incidence for them to even use MailMeter but they are glad that they have the technology in place so if they do encounter an issue or request, they can quickly find the relevant emails and respond in a timely manner.

“It’s our best solution for the price, simple yet affordable”
Dave Kajdasz, Supervisor, Email and Electronic Forms Service Team,
Erie 1 BOCES

Using the ISR individual search feature has allowed Erie 1 BOCES and the schools to keep smaller email stores, improve performance, keep back-up windows small, and allow users to quickly locate emails past the aging period or discover emails that they accidentally deleted. Because of MailMeter’s efficient architecture and built-in de-duplication process, Erie 1 BOCES experiences about a 50% reduction in the size of the Archive vs. the size of email servers. Data in the archive is static and mostly unchanged allowing for their back-up windows to shrink significantly against the overall data set.

Overall, Erie 1 BOCES is very happy with MailMeter and will continue to recommend the solution to schools.

Powerful
Offers users ability to perform a “google type search” on everyone’s email account. Legal, HR, or anyone with full access can find things that they were not looking for but that may be critical to the security or defense of their organization.
More Value
MailMeter is more cost effective than other major email archiving competitors, yet performs better, has dramatically faster searching, and more robust reporting features.
Easy To Use
Simple to install, deploy and use. MailMeter offers many ways to search for information and multiple standard reports to view email activities of employees.
Scalable
Can handle terabytes of email storage, tens of thousands of users, and clustered email server environments without impact on performance.
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