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Proactive Search Leads to Mimosa NearPoint |
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Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, Pinnacle Financial is one of the nation’s fastest-growing, independently owned mortgage lenders. Pinnacle Financial was founded in 1988 by seasoned loan originators Doug Long and Jeff Vratanina, who were determined to create a company that offered responsible lending solutions and an ethical and proactive approach to customer service. Pinnacle now has more than 35 offices and more than 300 employees.
Rick Chin, Pinnacle Financial’s senior vice president of information technology, first heard of Mimosa at an industry storage event while he was looking for an email archiving solution. Pinnacle is not a public company, but they heard about how companies were being sued for not being able to produce email for litigation.“We did not have any lawsuit pending, but you never know when one will happen. We did not want to be in a situation where we get a huge bill from attorneys, having to go back to tape for email discovery,” said Rick. “Rather, we wanted to be proactive and avoid the multimillions of dollars in email discovery fees that can result when you need to search backup tapes. By being proactive, we believe we can cut the costs exponentially.”
In addition to legal discovery, Pinnacle was looking for a way to improve access to email records for internal HR-related matters and investigations. “In addition, we wanted to provide a way for our in-house legal team and HR, if an issue came up, to quickly research potential employee issues involving email, without searching a ton of tapes,” explained Rick. “The more we looked into it, the more we found out—email archiving does all the email search functions for eDiscovery, and it also manages the Exchange data for growth issues. It manages email growth in the mailbox Stores by removing attachments. This feature helps with immediate mailbox size issues and it also helps to reduce backup times—an important issue because our tape backups of Exchange were taking too long to complete. Archiving also helped with data growth issues.”
Rick Chin installed Mimosa NearPoint in the Pinnacle Data Center, using their existing Microsoft® Exchange 2003 server. The total installation took just a couple of days and was handled by Rick, with Mimosa remote support assistance. “NearPoint installed very simply,” he explained. “Mimosa first performed a site survey, which helped to design the total solution—including server and storage hardware.” Rick installed NearPoint and had it running in less than two hours, doing the work himself with only a small amount of help from Mimosa Support. “Mimosa Support is very good, and I got just the help I needed,” said Rick. “They were phenomenal during installation. They kept in touch via email over the weekend when the install took place, and the Mimosa support engineer made sure all was OK—a very good experience.”
For legal discovery and archive search, NearPoint provides a search user interface that end users and auditors access via Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA). In the past, searching email records required hours and days of IT support time, at considerable cost. “Legal search and eDiscovery was the proactive piece of our installation,” said Rick. “Mimosa NearPoint provides my legal team with personal search capability. If multiple searches need to take place, my legal staff can perform them separately and privately. And there is no added expense of setting up an Exchange server and restoring backup tapes.”
Access to archive mailboxes and permission to search them are managed by Rick on the NearPoint Administrator Console. “Mimosa NearPoint enabled us to put the process in place that allows certain people to perform searches themselves—HR and Legal have access. I get many compliments from my remote users about the ease with which they can use NearPoint, and about how it helps them find lost email,” commented Rick.
As part of the initial implementation Chin tackled the Exchange storage environment. Using the NearPoint Mailbox Extension feature and a policy of six months for storage and 200KB for file size, attachments were removed from Exchange by NearPoint. According to Rick, “Mimosa helped improve all of our storage issues by reducing the amount of data in Exchange. Backups were cut way down, and we are not backing up the same data over and over again.”
“Mimosa gave me the tools to better manage Exchange. It also gave my users Outlook and OWA access so they can do their jobs better.”
For mailbox management, NearPoint has built-in mailbox restoration capability. A mailbox can be restored to Exchange, redirected to another mailbox, or stored offline in a PST file. Rick realized the benefits of using NearPoint to manage inactive mailboxes more efficiently. He explained, “Using Mimosa NearPoint, I developed a new process to manage former employees’ mailboxes. Now when employees leave Pinnacle, I can remove their mailbox from Exchange and rely on the archive mailbox. This process frees up space on Exchange without any loss of information.”
“For legal discovery, NearPoint has to be one of the easiest tools to use,” said Rick. “I point NearPoint to the mailboxes that I want to search, then enter the search words, and NearPoint pops out the results in seconds. All I need to do is select the results I want and export them to a PST file. I can perform the search and send the results to my in-house attorney in minutes.”
“I received some very heavy discounts from other archiving vendors, which made me a little suspect of their technology. When I was at the Gartner storage event, Gartner was talking about Mimosa and its unique email archiving technology. They said it was very unique and far ahead of what everyone else was doing. This point was very important to me,” explained Rick.
“Here at Pinnacle we have a very lean IT shop,” Rick commented. “We support thousands of remote users with only an eight-person staff. What I did not need was a product that required lots of server resources, lots of maintenance, lots of administration and user training, and a complex installation. I needed a tool that was very easy to install and manage, and easy on my resources—and Mimosa NearPoint delivered in all areas.”
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