Culobel Enhances Email Search and End User Productivity with Metalogix

The Company

Culobel’s history began in 1928, with the establishment of a button factory, Chaumont. The buttons were pressed in metal and primarily used for uniforms. Since the 1960s, the company has been named Culobel and it is a specialized supplier of metal presswork. Among Culobel’s customers are companies active in both assembly and construction. With its headquarters in Aalst, near Brussels, Belgium, Culobel also has three sites in the Czech Republic and one in China. Culobel has 260 employees and a turnover of about 25 million euro.

The Challenge

Over the years, Culobel has experienced rapid growth in email volume. This led to an overworked Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server and mailboxes that regularly exceeded their quotas. To free mailbox space, Culobel’s employees would archive email as PST files or – even less efficient – simply print or delete the excessive email messages.

“We saw PST files spread like wildfire,” said Anthony Van den Bossche, IT manager at Culobel, “although they hardly satisfy the need for email archiving. We wanted our employees to be able to archive their email correspondence, even the messages they will only need on some rare occasion. That’s when PST files don’t come in handy at all. It’s practically impossible to search them for specific content.”

Culobel needed an email archiving solution that would relieve the stress on its Exchange 2003 Server, without the need for extra capacity and without slowing server performance down. Ease of use and user transparency were also key considerations as Culobel didn’t want a solution that would impact its users’ performance or productivity. Finally, Culobel needed an email archiving solution that would be easy to search so that emails could be recovered from the archive with ease.

The Solution

Culobel considered a number of solutions, engaging the expertise of its trusted solution provider, Belgium-based Microcomputing. They had had experience with products from Symantec and GFI, but knew these products wouldn’t provide the features Culobel required. With Microcomputing’s advice, Culobel soon selected Metalogix Archive Manager – Exchange Edition. Archive Manager offered Culobel the user transparency and robust search features it needed without impact to server performance on its Exchange 2003 system.

“The beauty of the solution is the fact that the end user has no knowledge of the backend archiving process,” said Frederik Delfosse, Marketing, Microcomputing. “The end user has the impression he or she is still working in Outlook. The actual email archiving all happens behind the scenes. This is exactly the experience Culobel was looking for.”

Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition is a flexible solution that supports limitless email without quotas. It collects, uploads and archives data from PST files to protect them and make them easily available to users, even if they are working remotely. Because the solution offers a familiar Outlook or Outlook Web Access experience, it is transparent to users and doesn’t impact their productivity. Archive Manager Exchange Edition also offers complete email lifecycle management by capturing, routing, storing, restoring, migrating and deleting emails automatically, based on user policy, using a powerful Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) archive engine.

The Results

Since Microcomputing has implemented Metalogix Archive Manager Exchange Edition for Culobel, the company has seen significant user productivity savings, especially in terms of item search processes. Furthermore, the need for expanding mailbox quotas has disappeared and the email server is no longer overworked.

“Users used to print most of their documents when their email capacity was at its limit and this made searchability really time consuming,” said Van den Bossche. “They no longer have a need to print everything off, which is a huge cost savings. Now everything is searchable through the Outlook client. Employees realize that they are no longer limited in archiving email. As a result, they archive a lot more electronically, instead of archiving hard copies.”

Culobel has also benefitted from some significant infrastructure cost savings as a result of the newly implemented email archive. The company has avoided thousands on Microsoft licensing fees as well as the cost of adding a new server and storage box. What’s more, they can continue to use Exchange 2003, rather than investing in a whole system upgrade.

“There’s no urgent need to invest in a new server,” said Van den Bossche. “That’s an advantage as well. The solution for email archiving put our Exchange environment off the hook. For now, we have no immediate plans to migrate to a new version of Exchange Server.