Email Archiving Case Studies
MDA finds cure to eDiscovery
The Muscular Dystrophy Association is the nonprofit health agency dedicated to curing muscular dystrophy, ALS and related diseases by funding worldwide research. The Association also provides comprehensive health care and support services, advocacy and education.
MDA was created in 1950 by a group of adults with muscular dystrophy, parents of children with muscular dystrophy, and a physician-scientist studying the disorder. Since its earliest days it has been energized by its number-one volunteer and national chairman, entertainer Jerry Lewis.
The Association's programs are funded almost entirely by individual private contributors.
Opportunity
Headquartered in Tucson AZ, MDA maintains offices in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Rod Brandon, Vice President Information Technology, oversees the IT operations and centralized Microsoft Exchange email servers for MDA, which are located in Tucson, at MDA Headquarters. The MDA Executive staff issued a mandate that the IT staff must be able to quickly produce any email that has passed through the MDA email system, at any time. Simply keeping copies of every email was not enough; the email archive had to employ search capabilities allowing quick and complex searches across many combined parameters such as message text, phrases, sender, recipient (including cc and bcc), time, date, including the ability to search inside all email attachments.
Solution
Brandon was tasked with sourcing, installing and maintaining the email archiving system that would meet his organization’s functional requirements, and additionally be cost effective, easy to install, easy to use, manage and maintain. Brandon employed a trusted vendor to recommend such a product and together they evaluated several products, eventually deciding on the Jatheon Plug n Comply™ PnC 3000 email archiving appliance.
“The IT staff needed to fulfill the mandates of our executive staff, but at the same time have a product that would be easy to manage and extract email. The Jatheon solution appeared to be what we needed, and it has clearly lived up to our expectations.”, said Brandon
The Jatheon Plug n Comply™ email archiving appliance receives a copy of each and every email that passes through the Exchange email servers in real time, where it maintains an indestructible copy that can not be altered or deleted. Each email message is assigned a unique DNA fingerprint which may be used to validate the integrity of the archived email at any time.
Impact
Upon request from the Executive staff, a compliance officer may easily search the email archive using any combination of search parameters and quickly find and produce the requested email messages as either a PST mailbox file, a PDF file or print the messages directly to a printer. Additionally, the Jatheon system can be used to recover emails for end users who may have accidentally deleted them.
“We have been using the Jatheon system for approximately two years and it has worked flawlessly.”, said Brandon. “It is easy to query specific email parameters and view on screen or export the results to a PST file that can be viewed, searched or printed from any Microsoft Outlook client in our organization. We needed a simple, useful email archive solution and Jatheon fit all our requirements.”
"It is extremely easy to use. We do not have many requests to retrieve email but when we do there is no 'relearning' required to obtain the desired results. We simply have it running and for the most part forget it is even there. From time to time we have had to recover lost email or provide our legal department with email messages. The Jatheon solution has come through with flying colors in each case. The installation was simple, and Jatheon provided the help we needed to configure the system to talk with Exchange. The support staff at Jatheon was very valuable in providing the assistance we required to have everything up and running in quick order.”
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