smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Email is an indispensable part of the modern office, but for those who hate to delete, storing millions of messages can become a headache. We look at how Premiership football club Tottenham Hotspur tackled the problem.

Microsoft’s Exchange Server is a fairly standard option for handling email in-house. But it’s important to consider where all that email is being stored – many people don’t delete their email, resulting in an ever-increasing demand for expensive storage.

One alternative, which is proving popular with growing businesses, is hosted email accounts on the net (such as corporate Google accounts, you@yourbusiness.com). Another is to run the email server in-house, but outsource the archiving.

Premiership football club Tottenham Hotspur was struggling with exactly this problem and took the latter option. ‘Even though we’re a relatively small organisation, there was significant mail traffic,’ says Tottenham’s IT manager, Philip Rose.

‘Spam was becoming a major problem, and shutdowns and reboots took forever. If the phones go down most people have their mobiles or Blackberrys (sic), but God help us if the email goes down. Email is the most sensitive IT service in terms of availability – you have to minimise downtime.’

For Rose, the biggest problem was that the mail stored on the Exchange was inherently going to grow: ‘For example, our chairman finds it abhorrent to delete email and had 2,000 items in his inbox, as did the FD.’

The problem led Rose to search for a mail archive solution, eventually choosing a package that stores emails on the organisation’s Exchange Server for just 30 days before they are archived.

‘We took a support contract so we could resolve anything quickly and proactively,’ he says. ‘You should seriously consider a support contract if you regard email as essential.’

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