LA Fitness has freed bandwidth
on its network by using auditing software to cut the proportion of
personal e-mail on its network from almost 40% to 2%.
The project to implement
Waterford Technologies' Mailmeter package,
which began in 2004, was originally intended to reduce e-mail
storage requirements, but it has also eased pressure on the
company's network bandwidth.
Since deploying the forensic module from the Mailmeter package,
the health and fitness chain has been better able to ensure that
employees adhere to the company's e-mail policy.
Sejal Shah, ICT strategist at LA Fitness, said, "Things improved
once we explained to staff that mail was being monitored. Now only
2% of mail is personal."
The system also enables LA Fitness to drill down into e-mail
usage to ensure that staff are not using inappropriate
language.
The Mailmeter software reduces e-mail archiving requirements by
removing attachments from messages and replacing them with links.
Mailmeter stores the attachments in a searchable archive on a
separate server. This allows the storage team at LA Fitness to
reduce the size of e-mail inboxes.
LA Fitness's implementation is based on a Microsoft Exchange
2000 e-mail server and a SQL Server 2000 database, which Mailmeter
uses for storing archived messages.
Shah said that, over the coming month, LA Fitness would be
evaluating upgrading to Exchange 2007.
Firms struggle
with e-mail storage
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