I'm Alan Warne, I'm the team leader for ICT Operations for Environment Canterbury. Environment Canterbury is the regional council for the Canterbury region of the south Island of New Zealand. We've got three main entities, Environment Canterbury itself which is around the management of our natural resources of soil, air, water and the coastal region. There's also the Metro service where we oversee the provision of the bus services across the county and we also provide civil defence. Environment Canterbury first started using the GFI products back in 2005. They were looking for a solution to the mail archiving problem they had at the time. We need to comply to the Public Records Act so we need to capture all our emails. Before we had the MailArchiver we had a mess of PST files around the organization.
Back in 2005 we were using Exchange 2003 which has a very limited capacity so a lot of staff did have to copy their emails out into various uncontrolled situations, so MailArchiver allows us to capture all the emails going in and out of the organization before there are received by the staff member which means that even if a staff member accidentally deletes a message we still got that record, so when we get to LGOIMA requests Local Government Official Information Act requests we have all the information. By centralizing into MailArchiver we can find the email and that saves us a lot of time and effort, so we can respond to LGOIMA requests much faster. We benefit by using MailArchiver because its web-based so the users can be on any machine and get to their email archive. They don't have to go into Outlook. They don't have to open up a product, they don't have to be at a certain machine that has a certain piece of software installed, so for the user it's a great solution because they can get to their emails and search all of their history from anywhere.
The GFI products are all using standard Microsoft products. It's very easy for us to integrate that into our environment, we've got all those products already, we understand that architecture so from an architectural point of view their products just work in IT. We understand what they need and it's very easy for us to implement them. Our benefits from having MailArchiver around mitigating the risk of LGOIMA requests we can guarantee where emails are concerned that we've got all our public records, so every interaction we have with the public we've got covered. About two years ago we were hitting a problem with our MailArchiver because we were running it on a physical server and we were running out of physical disk. So what we did was we created a virtual environment, we used all the latest server operating systems and we installed the latest version of GFI MailArchiver on there. It was nice at the time because MailArchiver supported Server 2012 R2 and that operating system had only just come out so we didn't get held back by the software we were trying to install.
By moving from a physical environment the virtual environment we can very easily add on extra disc and MailArchiver can just keep growing and we've never stopped so since we moved from physical to a virtual environment we have had no issue with capturing all our emails. When we've done the migrations in the past between versions we found this very easy and the support we get from GFI has really helped us move through that, though we haven't actually had to call them that often because mostly it just works. During the migration we moved 2 terabytes of database files. Something like sixteen and a half million emails were archived in those at the time so it was quite a significant amount of data we were dragging around the network, so it was very satisfying that we actually met our deadline and everything worked, all the databases came back up and the staff just kept working, without even noticing that we made the change.