Searching for one misplaced message-on a server overflowing with millions of e-mails-used to take the better part of a day at Credit Union 1 here.
"Helping the staff find an e-mail in our Microsoft Exchange archives was a very cumbersome process," said Mark Rhodes, vice president of Information Technology Services at the $500-million CU.
Contributing to the mess is what some have described as "e-mail storms," in which multiple copies of the same e-mail sent to multiple recipients-plus all those recipients responses to the original message-clog up the e-mail system.
But Credit Union 1 has cleaned up its spaghetti mess of e-mails after installing an automated e-mail management and archive solution, Rhodes said.
Now, search time is "negligible," he said. "We turn around requests in a matter of minutes."
With E-mail Archive, every e-mail and attachment sent or received via Microsoft Exchange is automatically captured by a content management server along with Credit Union 1's other imaged and electronic documents.
Credit Union 1 uses E-mail Archive as part of the OnBase enterprise content management suite provided by Hyland Software Inc.
Credit unions are under the gun to readily produce e-mail records if called upon by regulatory agencies or as part of a lawsuit.
But it's also important that old e-mails, which hog storage space, are easily destroyed when they are no longer needed.
Accessing and destroying e-mails is a formidable task, considering that Credit Union 1 sends about 41,000 e-mails per month and receives about 35,000, Rhodes said.
"We faced a difficult process in trying to enforce a set of rules surrounding the retention and destruction of e-mails," said Rhodes.
Credit Union 1, a beta-test site for E-mail Archive, is taking the implementation in steps. In April, the CU rolled out archiving capabilities. By year's end, retention and destruction policies and procedures will be automatically enforced.
"First, we want to aggregate all e-mails in one place and fully understand the system's capabilities," explained Rhodes.
In the past, employees were left to their own devices to save, organize and search for old e-mails, he continued.
"Everyone uses Microsoft Outlook, which allows you to take your e-mail messages, save them for any amount of time and move them off of the e-mail systems to file servers at will," Rhodes said.
"That made it very difficult for us to know where any given piece of e-mail was or how many copies of it existed," he said. "And it was near impossible to enforce any retention or destruction policies."
Now, the "e-mail storm" is retreating from Credit Union 1, Rhodes said. That's because E-mail Archive stores each e-mail only once, instead of consuming storage space with any duplicate copies sent to other recipients.
"Having a single copy of each e-mail significantly diminishes the number of 'e-mail storms,' where you archive these massive, unmanageable e-mail chains," Rhodes explained. "A chain could include an e-mail going out to ten employees and responses sent back to multiple recipients."
Soon, employees themselves will be able to use the search tools, which can access e-mails by a variety of criteria, such as sender, recipient, subject line, date, specific text and permission level.
"That's where the full power of E-mail Archive will be realized," Rhodes added.
E-mail Archive will also allow Credit Union 1 to easily delete e-mails according to date, user's name or classification, according to Steve Comer, industry specialist, CU vertical market, for Hyland.
OnBase is used by 350 credit unions nationwide, ranging from $30-million to $5-billion in assets. The Cleveland-based firm offers document imaging, workflow, electronic document management, COLD and records management.
CUJ Resources
For info on this story:
* Credit Union 1 at www.cu1.org
* Hyland Software www.onbase.com
