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We sat down with GroupWise Admin Gary Green, the Vice President of Technology for the National Kidney Foundation, to talk about his experience with using a hosted email archiving service. Below is an excerpt from the interview, or you can view the full Gary Green Interview on SaaS-based Email Archiving.

Sonian: What is your role at the National Kidney Foundation?

Gary Green: My title is Vice President of Technology and I have responsibility over most things involving technology in the organization, which in a broad sense includes: web services, our web site, our data base, and - for lack of a better term - user services, such as our network, desktop, and support for our users.

Sonian: What are some projects you were able to focus on with the time you saved by switching to the Sonian hosted email archiving service?

GG: We have 3 main individuals who are basically the first responders to speak in terms of user support. These are the three who deal with email issues, email archive issues - and their workload hasn't really changed, but they are able to work more on projects that are more productive for the company. One issue we have neglected is the issue of training and making people more productive with the tools that we have. We have just lately been able to start devoting time towards making videos so we can provide some self taught information and lessons. We can make web movies and we're hoping increasing the average user knowledge base will result in fewer questions that aren't the most useful or the most needy, like "how do I use my account?" We believe, with a little help from us, people can figure this stuff out for themselves - and we think now we are in a position to be able to focus some time on doing that. We are still working with people and going over how to use the archives. There is a bit of a learning curve but it certainly is once you get over that hump; it's a much better scenario than the situation we had before this.

Sonian: Were you worried you would have less work for your IT professionals once you shifted to the cloud?

GG: You know it never even came up. It's funny, I can see where some people can be concerned about that but what we were looking to do, not to repeat myself, was to get away from the nuts and bolts things that tie people up, like you come to work at 8:30 and all of a sudden its 3:30 and you haven't been able to really focus on the things your boss is bothering you about. I think that being able to find a solution that takes a lot of that away from us has given a lot to our staff and it has improved their moral. It's not like they are constantly reacting anymore, they can now be more proactive, but we never for a moment thought we would not have anything to do. We are barely scratching the surface of user training and it has been an area of interest for years, but never had the time to devote to it because we were always dealing with the back-log of three or four service requests for each of our staff.

If you are interested in learning more about how Gary and the National Kidney Foundation benefited a from Hosted Email Archiving Solution, download the Case Study, or listen to the full Gary Green interview.

View the original Sonian blog post here: "How Switching to Hosted Email Archiving Saved My IT Department..."

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.