MILES & STOCKBRIDGE

Miles & Stockbridge, a regional law firm of 160 lawyers in Maryland and Virginia, logs in 10,000 e-mail messages a day. The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, with four servers and 350 mailboxes, sees up to 350,000 e-mail messages a week. With mailbox limits and a need for long-term storage, e-mail capacity management is an immediate concern for everyone.

Archive One Capacity, an e-mail archiving and capacity management solution for Microsoft Exchange, is designed for organizations that need a quick and effective way to minimize mailbox size. Version 2.3, released Sept 1st, is a single technology solution that does not require client installations or user training.

"The common misconception is that the problem is Exchange," says Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. "It's not - the problem is that you have too much e-mail. Archive One Capacity stores old mail on an archive Exchange server, which administrators already know how to run. In less than five minutes, organizations are now in a position to move massive amounts of data to less expensive storage areas."

New features include integration with standard anti-virus solutions (in case any archived e-mails contain a virus), the ability to restore an e-mail back into the mailbox; and an architecture that supports distributed Exchange implementations. Users can move between offices and still access their archived e-mail. "The architecture of Archive One Capacity means that we can keep our critical primary Exchange servers lean and mean with the highest levels of performance, while we have the security of knowing that the archived e-mail is still there when the user needs it," says Paul Cartwright, senior network analyst with Macfarlanes, a major UK law firm.

Managing mailbox size remains the number one reason customers are buying archiving products. C2C has seen a 400 percent increase in Archive One Capacity sales in the last six months because administrators are looking to decrease the data stored on the front-end server to reduce the backup/restore times of Exchange. In a test environment, Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education was able to cut a mail database down to one third of its original size. "I would estimate that when we get Archive One Capacity in our live environment, we will trim it down from 45 GB to about 15 GB," says Doug McCullar, director of LAN Operations.

"We have been using Archive One Capacity to manage the SENT and DELETED e-mail folders, taking the weight out of the users' mailbox and allowing us better controls over recovery and retention," says Kenneth Adams, CIO at Miles & Stockbridge.