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Email is a critical communication tool for every company. But for the Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), an independent charity that looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace, it is more than just a message transfer between customers and suppliers. The data and information stored within email messages is a valuable asset. It is important to secure them as there are historical records that need to be preserved.

Historic Royal Palaces have four GroupWise® post offices – one at each of their main sites. They currently have about 650 live mailboxes. Though they do not currently support mobile devices, they provide a remote access service so that the staff can access their mail through WebAccess. They currently back up their email on a nightly basis to tape and GWAVA Retain™ imports e-mails every night from each of their four post offices. Before installing GWAVA Retain, the users were concerned about storage issues; however with Retain, users no longer have to worry.

Rob Ellner is the Network Manager at HRP and together with his team, he is responsible for administering and supporting the GroupWise email infrastructure.

“Before we settled for Retain our mail was archived using inbuilt GroupWise technology to users’ home drives. This was messy and expensive. Retain has centralized all email retention and the inbuilt single instance technology allows a far greater amount of data to be stored,” explains Rob Ellner.

Retain strikes the perfect balance between cost effective storage and lightning fast retrieval of messaging data. A key factor for HRP was that the backend of Retain is driven by a SQL database. This provides a greater scalability and performance.

“Retain’s single instance technology was an immediate attraction. We knew that this would allow HRP to keep a much higher proportion of its email data, without having to constantly request staff to clear down ‘un-needed’ mail,” says Ellner.

Historic Royal Palaces have been successfully using GWAVA Retain since January 2009. Apart from Retain they are using GWAVA Vertigo for user mailbox management and have used it for the past two years. They are also looking to roll out GWAVA Reload in the coming months to provide a resilient GroupWise infrastructure.

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.