Mahesh Sharma | July 15, 2008
case study | MM Electrical
AS electrical parts distributor MM Electrical quickly grew branches across the country, its email system also grew. In fact, it was out of control.
Don't let your email system become so tangled that it stunts company growth
In the past couple of years the distributor has opened branches in locations as far afield as North Queensland and Darwin, and while it had the technology to support this expansion it had no system to centrally archive emails.
As individual employees were largely responsible for backing up and archiving emails, the company risked losing business if something went wrong.
"People out on the sites were collecting huge mail files and when they wanted to they'd archive them on their PCs," MM technology support manager Neil Evans says.
"It left a very big risk because many staff don't back up their PC.
"If, for example, a contract was in the pipeline and information was flowing from a staff member to a supplier to a customer, that information would be lost if that employee left the company and deleted all their emails - which has happened.
"We would have no protection on that contract and the tender may be lost."
Confusing the situation further was the acquisition of pipe manufacturer Vinidex several years ago, which meant MM Electrical was operating two email systems.
"We were finding that our mail servers were growing," Evans says.
"We needed to do something about that, but the other problem was that we were running two sets of mail servers. Vinidex runs Exchange and MM runs Lotus Notes."
The company installed Symantec's Enterprise Vault journaling and mail archiving software to centralise its email storage, enabling seamless archiving of email as well as reducing the size of the mail databases.
"It's an ongoing and very simple rollout and doesn't require major assistance from staff, which is a big benefit for our business," Evans says.
"Archiving to the user is seamless and recovery of items from the archives is seamless." Evans says the company is now protected against loss of data, and the next step may be to roll out Symantec's file share archiving.
"It gives us the protection we need to have no impact on our business and future incomes due to loss of important documents," Evans says.
The importance of the system is not that it saves on the technology budget, he says.
"Previously we were losing money and the possibility of future business."
THE PROBLEM
MM Electrical had no central system for archiving emails, and risked losing business if information went astray.
THE PROCESS
It installed Symantec's Enterprise Vault software.
THE RESULT
All emails sent across the company are stored in a central database, which has also freed up storage space.