Case Study - Harvest House Publishers

Company: Harvest House Publishers
Location: US
Industry: Publishing
Number of Employees: 100
Product/s in Use: GFI MailArchiver™

Quick Read

Harvest House Publishers are involved in the publishing industry with a specific focus on religious, Christian and inspirational books. Emails are an important part of their communication processes but storing all their emails in PST files became a troublesome and inconvenient way of archiving; therefore Harvest House Publishers decided to implement an email archiving solution to minimize the use of PST files and to create a faster and more effective email archiving and retrieval process. They opted for GFI MailArchiver because of its excellent price and seamless integration with their existing IT infrastructure.

Challenges

Harvest House Publishers publish a wide array of books dealing with religious and inspirational matters and email is their primary source of communication with their many clients. Fully aware of the operational and legal importance of archiving emails, Harvest House Publishers used to rely on PST files as their main email storage method. The publisher, however, soon started to realize that PST were cumbersome and were dispersed throughout the network. This made indexing and searching for emails a headache and time-consuming. There was also an increased risk that, using, important data in emails could be lost or permanently deleted.

“These issues prompted us to implement GFI MailArchiver as our email archiving solution,” said Mr. Jeremey Sturm, Network/Data Security Manager of Harvest House Publishers. “Our aim was to drastically reduce the use of PST files and to have a solution for maintaining the integrity of the emails.”

Harvest House Publishers needed an email archiving product that would be easy to install and configure and that wouldn’t provide any hassles for the users. Furthermore the solution was required to integrate with their existing setup.

Implementation

Harvest House Publishers did their research into email archiving products and opted for GFI MailArchiver because, “although there were not many email archiving solutions available at the time, GFI MailArchiver had the capability to use a SQL backend which was a positive feature for our setup”, said Mr. Sturm.

The installation of GFI MailArchiver helped address the various issues that Harvest House Publishers were encountering. The email archiving and email management software allowed the company to meet compliance and legal regulations because all corporate emails were being stored in a central location and this also ensure that they had not been tampered with. Email searching and retrieval was much faster than searching through number PST files for an email.

“GFI MailArchiver has helped us reduce the storage need for the PST files. It has also helped us maintain the integrity of the content of the emails, so if any questions would arise we could reference the emails with ease and the assurance of the completeness of the emails,” said Mr. Sturm.

“GFI MailArchiver has provided a state-of-the-art way of searching for old emails by using XML indexing. It is much faster than trying to hunt down an email in a Mailbox or PST file/s. Since the software is web based is also provides an easy way for users to access their emails. Lastly the software is flexible enough for us to section out the databases into quarter or monthly groupings, which allow us to remove the older databases according to our Business Continuity Plan.”

From a technological viewpoint the installation of GFI MailArchiver was a simple process as the software was compatible with the existing setup of the company causing no problems to the company’s other technological hardware even when server upgrades are needed.

“It has been quite a while since we have installed the original GFI MailArchiver and we have moved it a few times due to server upgrades. Each time we move it, it is very easy to do. There is hardly any downtime and no emails have ever been lost in the transitions. Since SQL is used as the backend for storing the data, all that needs to be done when moving the software is to re-point to the data and off you go!”

“Since everyone in the company had to be trained and assured that they could stop using their PST files and start using GFI MailArchiver instead, a few months went by till things started to settle down a bit and the users felt more comfortable about not losing their emails. The storage and backup results were immediate” said Mr. Sturm.

Benefits

The implementation of GFI MailArchiver saved Harvest House Publishers both time and money. Since employees were no longer storing their emails in PST files on their individual workstations, searching for, and retrieving emails became a fast and simple process as all emails were stored in a centralized location, thus not detracting employees from their work. Hardware benefits were also noticeable as the servers were no longer under strain from the hoarding of everyone’s emails in their inboxes.

“Financially this software provides a way to help maintain the storage levels to a manageable solution, which in turn saves us money. It also helps when it comes to saving time trying to find older emails” confirmed Mr. Sturm.

Target Reached

“Looking back over the years our intended targets were met and the email culture at our company has changed to the benefit of having less storage issues and less questions of lost emails in PST files.”

Links

For more information about GFI MailArchiver visit http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/. Download your free trial here http://www.gfi.com/downloads/register.aspx?pid=mar

^{November 2009}