Coining IT in
Coining IT in
The Royal Australian Mint has recently struggled to progress with new designs for Australian gold coins because vital knowledge was being lost inside deleted emails. Those messages can now be stored for life, keeping future project ideas alive and allowing them to be easier to complete.
The Royal Australian Mint, which was opened in 1965, holds a place in history as the first mint in Australia not to be a branch of the Royal Mint, London.
It was commissioned to produce Australia's decimal coinage, which came into circulation in February 1966. Since its opening, the Mint has produced over eleven billion circulating coins and has the capacity to produce over two million coins per day, or over six hundred million coins per year.
As well as producing a vast amount of coins, the Mint also produces and receives a vast amount of emails, which had increasingly been proving far more difficult to manage than the millions of coins that end up in our pockets and cash registers across the country.
The Royal Australian Mint implemented Legato's email management system to make sure all of its most important information about future designs could be stored in a central repository with easy access at all times through a dynamic search engine.
This Government division of the Treasury faced a common problem affecting many large organisations at the moment who are finding it difficult to cope with increasing volumes of emails each year, many of which contain crucial knowledge and information that needs to be kept safe.
Not only did this department have a headache with storing these emails, it also found it difficult to sort through them quickly. In addition, they faced compliance problems when moving them from individual mail boxes to a central repository.
John Power, IT Manager of The Royal Australia Mint, recalls these problems with dismay.
"I realised we were facing a multitude of email related problems that required urgent attention. Like most government agencies, we long recognised the storage demand that emails were creating for us, but now we had a compliance issue to worry about as well, which only made the problem worse. Keeping seven years of emails was not going to be easy. We knew we needed to conform to the Australian archives rules and regulations, which requires organisations to keep information, explain how it is stored and why it is stored. So we had huge legal issues that we had to deal with, dictated by government policy.
"Like most manufacturers we need to retain a detailed written and stored knowledge base, but we found to our surprise that this actually existed in most cases within emails. By deleting inactive mail boxes we faced the risk of losing our knowledge base. So we came to the conclusion that we had to store the emails with all attachments and content in a fast index-based retrieval system which made it easy to search emails by any text or attachment."
Power attended a conference in 2002, which was where he encountered Legato's EmailXtender: Capture, Organise, Access email management system solution. This is now fully incorporated into the Australian Mint set up.
The system provides both enterprise data storage and content management for emails. It is a policy based system that automatically collects, organises, retains and retrieves email messages and attachments. It also reduces email server stress and bottlenecks by extending email message stores into low-cost and high capacity storage devices.
It reduced the amount of time his organisation was spending on keeping the email system up and running. They used to spend an average of an hour a day on making sure it was under control, but now they only need to work on it for two hours a month.
Stephen Lloyd-Jones, Managing Director of Legato Australia/New Zealand explains why managing emails in large organisations is such a hot issue at the moment.
"Most information now is born digital and dies digital and email is becoming the new DNA. There is no such thing as "delete" anymore because there are ways to keep information stored indefinitely, if necessary. But email is now the new smoking gun.
Email has overtaken post in the last 10 years. The solution needs to be rooted in accessibility and the time needed to recover the file. It is the board's responsibility to take care of the problem, because the fines could be bigger than the cost of storage management. The trade between business needs and technology issues realises the necessity for email management, which involves being able to store information and retrieve it quickly under an index based system."
After first seeing the Legato core email management demonstration in April 2002, The Royal Australian Mint was ready to conduct trials on their Exchange/Windows NT System in December the same year. This involved deleting emails from an individual server, moving them to a central mail server and then restoring them back to the individual server. The trial went successful and led to a production roll-out in April 2003 which was tested and then implemented in July, 2003.
There are now over 100 users and six servers at Royal Australian Mint now using the Legato email software. They have implemented half a dozen rules within the software that decide what will be kept and for how long. The emails, based on these rules, are moved to the separate mail server currently holding some 14GB of data but capable of up to 60GB. A duplicate live and low cost disk based system is used for differential back ups.
Power is pleased that all of his email management problems have been solved, thanks to the Legato model.
The software gives you the opportunity to store your emails on a different location, rather than on your mail server. It also gives you the chance to archive your messages so that you actually do store them properly. You can quickly retrieve key information thanks to a strong search engine and deleted emails are not actually lost because there is always a copy kept on the Legato system.
You can also search for parts of the message under different categories, such as headings, sender, subject, key words and attachments. All users are able to search for the key information from their mailboxes through using a search engine available on Microsoft Outlook."
The Royal Australian Mint has experienced enormous benefits with this new system. The Legato EmailXtender has provided fast, easy compliance with snap audits; it's saving money for the government; all the knowledge in emails are now stored and easily restored or found; emails are efficiently retrieved through an 'index-based' system, and all the records are saved and stored even if an individual user 'deletes' them.
Power is proud that everybody in the company seems to be happy with this solution."The case was certainly helped when our CEO complained of lost emails and we were able to retrieve in minutes, not hours or days, as was previously the case."