Luton Borough Council

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Luton Borough Council

Luton BC had a long-standing relationship with Fujitsu Services and at this point learnt that Fujitsu was working in partnership with KVS to offer its customers the benefits of Enterprise Vault. Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange™ is an enterprise-scale software product for managing the archiving, retention and retrieval of information contained within Exchange user mailboxes, PST files or public folders.

The Challenge

Like all other local authorities, Luton Borough Council is working towards the Government’s target that by 2005 all council services will be available to the public electronically. This brings a requirement for the safety of information supplied by individuals under the Data Protection Act.

Local authorities are also expected to meet a standard set by the Lord Chancellor’s office whereby they must have a proper records management system by 2004. This in turn is part of the Freedom of Information Act, which gives individuals the right to see what personal information any organisation has on them.

Despite its commitment to high standards, Luton was well aware that meeting all the legal requirements was an onerous task. In particular, the tracking of emails had to be done manually because of the lack of tools for global search and retrieve. The IT department had to dedicate the equivalent of half a full time member of staff simply on internal requests to track emails.

These issues became more of a priority when in late 2001 one local resident exercised a citizen’s right to ask for all personal information that the Council held. The IT department calculated that it would take its postmaster 55 to 60 working days to collect all the records. As Chris Kadwill commented: "We realised that this was totally impractical but if we did not respond then we would be acting illegally."

The Solution

Luton BC had a long-standing relationship with Fujitsu Services and at this point learnt that Fujitsu was working in partnership with KVS to offer its customers the benefits of Enterprise Vault. Enterprise Vault for Microsoft Exchange™ is an enterprise-scale software product for managing the archiving, retention and retrieval of information contained within Exchange user mailboxes, PST files or public folders. It compresses and stores email records, enables easy search and retrieval and allows journaling for audit and regulation. Enterprise Vault means that mailboxes can be used more effectively – by applying an archiving policy emails are removed from the online Microsoft Exchange database and held in the Vault. This reduces the size of the Exchange database, but retains the email, which can be tracked and recalled at any time.

Luton turned to Fujitsu for advice, knowing that Fujitsu was very familiar with the budgetary, timescale and contractual requirements of local government. "Fortunately, we had budget economy savings left," explained Chris Kadwill. "However we had to be quick. We had to allocate the budget before the end of March or we would lose an opportunity."

"Fujitsu brought all its knowledge of local government and its years of experience into play. All the legal and contractual requirements were processed by the middle of March, the order was placed at the end of March and the software was delivered and installed during the first week of April."

The Benefits

"We’re very pleased, we like to be innovative and we feel we are ready for new legislation in 2004 and for e-government in 2005," said Chris Kadwill.

"99% of authorities would not know how many incoming emails they receive or what is in them yet they are accountable for them. We now know that 23,000 emails are received or generated through the authority in one day and we can zoom in and deal with any issues that arise when necessary. The new software will be hugely time saving. We estimate that the individual request, which would have taken 55 days, would now take 4 hours. Vaulting enhances our whole email system."

Users will have no problems caused by overloaded mailboxes. Emails are condensed to about 10% of the original size. Once in the vault, they can be retrieved but they cannot be changed, providing a tamper proof system. The new system adds retention information so that records will be automatically deleted when appropriate. “It would be impossible to manage by human intervention alone,” concluded Chris Kadwill. In addition Luton BC will also be saving several gigabytes of space on its 4 Microsoft Exchange mail servers.

The Implementation

A design workshop was held with Luton Borough Council to determine the most appropriate Enterprise Vault configuration and policy settings to meet their message archiving requirements. Enterprise Vault was then implemented according to the resulting solution design.

As soon as the software was installed, it was technically available for rollout, but Luton followed its own ISO9000 procedures for implementation. This involved three phases. IT administrative staff first began to familiarise themselves with the software and use the journaling option. The software was then rolled out to a small audience within the IT department. This pilot deployment went very smoothly. The test users began to determine the look and feel of the screen; agree naming conventions and user decision-making requirements; and develop training manuals and programmes. Finally, the software will be rolled out to 2,500 users with full support.

The Expertise

Fujitsu has invested heavily in developing the expertise to build Microsoft-based IT infrastructures. KVS Vault is one example of how Fujitsu works with product vendors to build solutions for its customers

Chris Kadwill's verdict:
"Fujitsu provided the glue between Luton Borough Council and KVS. Luton had a need and an expectation; through its expertise and knowledge of the local government environment Fujitsu was able to bring everything together in a very short time."