KnowledgeWorks Foundation
KnowledgeWorks Foundation, based in Cincinnati, OH, is an educational philanthropic organization with a mission to increase the number and diversity of people who value and access education by creating new and ever-improving existing, educational opportunities at pre-kindergarten through high school and post-high school institutions and community organizations. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of many high-profile contributors to KnowledgeWorks programs.Email is a mission critical application for KnowledgeWorks' communication-intensive objectives. As is true for many organizations, the volume of email was growing at an alarming rate, with the email database tripling in size over the last three years. As it became more difficult to perform a full backup of its Microsoft Exchange email server each night, KnowledgeWorks Senior Manager, Technology and Web Services Matthew Barcus and Systems Engineer Kevin Mast knew they had to face the rising tide of email sooner rather than later.
Ongoing loyalty
KnowledgeWorks has a five-year long relationship with Logicalis that dates back to its then-pioneering implementation of IP Telephony. KnowledgeWorks had worked with another Cisco partner prior to that point, but Barcus said the responsiveness and thoroughness of Logicalis to their request for proposal won the IPT project, and the way Logicalis conducted the project won their ongoing loyalty. KnowledgeWorks has called on Logicalis for a broad range of technology projects since then.
There was a certain amount of serendipity involved in the fact that Logicalis had just launched an Email Management Practice when asserting control of the email environment at KnowledgeWorks rose to the top of Barcus' to do list.
An initial conversation with Logicalis' Vice President National Infrastructure Consulting Eric Linxweiler encouraged them to make email archiving a priority. Besides understanding the technology involved, Linxweiler personally led the email archiving initiative within Logicalis and had hands on experience with the administrative, political and cultural implications of actively managing an organization's email.
Follow up conversations with Account Exec Gerald Smith and Managing Consultant, Email Management Practice Tom Bridge set the process in motion. Bridge began by conducting a total analysis of KnowledgeWorks' email environment and outlined the management advantages that were possible with a well-thought out plan.
The technology, in many ways, is the simplest part of the strategy. Coming up with the policies necessary to guide the email archiving implementation took nearly a month and involved virtually everyone within KnowledgeWorks. Bridge was called upon often to advise Barcus and Mast as the policy building progressed.
Ahead of the curve
Because KnowledgeWorks is a non-profit organization, it doesn't have to adhere directly to the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements that apply to public corporations. Barcus reasons that it is only a matter of time, however, before non-profits will need to comply with similar regulations, and he wanted to stay ahead of the curve.
Besides pleasing the regulators, KnowledgeWorks had another constituency to please: its employees. "We treat our users well here," Mast notes. They wanted to be very discreet about making changes and imposing limits on a user's email account.
In the end, using EMC's EmailXtender and some creative techniques like "shortcutting" - removing attachments to the archive and putting pointers to them in Exchange - and "journaling" - logging all inbound and outbound SMTP and Exchange email - Logicalis was able to help KnowledgeWorks reduce the size of its email database from more than 70 Gigs to just over 20 Gigs. They are now able to backup the entire database every night. In the process, they realized additional savings from being able to free up high-end fiber storage and move lower priority data to less expensive storage.
There were some direct benefits to the users as well. It may take a second longer for an email user to retrieve an archived attachment, but the ease of use and sophistication of the new search facility built into EmailXtender more than makes up for it. "With Logicalis' help we were able to take control of the email environment with the least impact on our users," Mast notes. The implementation itself went through without a hitch.
"The relationship with Logicalis has worked out very well," Barcus summarizes. "We're real honest with them, and they're real honest with us. We might be able to find less expensive options, but the value of having Logicalis as a trusted partner is worth much more to me than saving a few dollars."
