OKLAHOMA STATE REGENTS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, with four servers and 350 mailboxes, sees up to 350,000 e-mail messages a week - and each and every e-mail has to be saved indefinitely.

Oklahoma's Open Records Act allows citizens to obtain government records so they "are vested with the inherent right to know and be fully informed about their government." This also means that all e-mails related to the Regents are saved indefinitely.

Although individual privacy rights are adequately protected and some statutes create a confidential privilege, the Open Records Act basically means that any information submitted to a government agency will be available to the public. The Regents, the coordinating board of control for Oklahoma's 25 public colleges and universities and two higher education centers, falls into this category. 

All student loans guaranteed through the federal government are administered by the Regents through the Oklahoma Guaranteed Student Loan Program. With mailbox limits and a need for long-term storage, e-mail capacity management is an immediate concern for Doug McCullar, director of LAN Operations. 

Compliance to regulation and capacity management.

Archiving messages is one way to adhere to the Open Records Act as well as decrease the data stored on the front-end server and reduce the backup/restore times of Microsoft Exchange. The Oklahoma State Regents is implementing Archive One Capacity, C2C's e-mail archiving and capacity management solution for Exchange. In a test environment, the 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 our mail database down from 45 GB to about 15 GB," says McCullar.