By Gregg Davis

It is no surprise that email provides the communications foundation for companies of virtually all sizes across nearly all industries. In fact, email is now mission-critical; without it, organizations struggle to meet corporate objectives and lose what has become a fundamental tool for doing business in the digital age.

Yet, email use is not without its challenges. As more business information is exchanged and stored via email, and government and industry regulations directed at such communications increase, organizations must find a way to comply with strict requirements without impacting user productivity, overburdening IT, or exceeding tight budgets.

Webcor Builders found the answer to such challenges in an intelligence email archiving and e-discovery solution. With it, the company has saved thousands of dollars in both manpower and IT infrastructure while meeting regulatory and legal demands.

The Builders’ Toolset
At Webcor Builders, email is the vehicle of choice for sharing the majority of communications relevant to its various job sites. Webcor, the largest commercial and industrial contractor both in Los Angeles County and in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, was one of the first contractors to extend its corporate computer network to all job sites via high-speed data lines and give all members of the team immediate access to information such as drawings, photographs and digital models. On most large-scale projects, the company uses an Internet-based collaboration tool that provides the owner, architect and consultants with real-time web-based access to an internal project management database.

Furthermore, Webcor is extending its corporate network beyond the job site trailer and providing key field supervisors and managers with wireless PDAs to connect them to critical network functions and enable them to spend more time where the action is—in the field.

Webcor’s IT infrastructure enables personnel to not only stay in constant communication with one another and corporate headquarters but also to provide a documentation trail. After all, industry and government regulations require it and legal obligations demand it.

Generating messages and documentation is one thing; but retaining the right message or document in the right place for the right period of time is quite another—and so is being able to retrieve the right message at the right moment.

To that end, Webcor turned to Symantec’s Enterprise Vault with Discovery Accelerator. With this intelligent archiving email and file platform, storing, managing and discovering data from email systems, content management and collaboration systems, and even instant messaging platforms became faster, easier and more cost-effective.

Meeting Code
Like many of today’s corporations, Webcor must adhere to a variety of industry and federal regulations that impact its communications practices. For example, although the company is privately owned, most of its clients are not; as a result, Webcor must meet guidelines set by Sarbanes-Oxley and be able to provide requested information if one of its publicly held clients is audited.

Webcor is also subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Because the company underwrites its own healthcare insurance, HIPAA requirements aimed at protecting patient information must be met.

What’s more, Webcor is also faced with meeting the strict requirements established by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), including recent specifications regarding the preservation of data prior to and during litigation. According to the rule, all electronically stored information of an organization, including email, is to be thoroughly examined and searched no later than the first pre-trial discovery-related meeting—which is required to take place within 99 days.

That’s not all. The FRCP also specifies that during such a search, parties must either present copies of all electronically stored information that a company may use to support its claims or defenses, or descriptions of that information by category and location.

No wonder Webcor opted to replace its manual legal discovery process with an automated tool. After all, manual methods are extremely time-consuming and costly and often unreliable and incomplete.

E-Discovery Made Easy
Webcor’s archiving and e-discovery software tool of choice obviates the need to devote scarce resources to meeting regulatory requirements. In fact, it used to take the company’s legal search team an entire month to discover relevant communications; now it takes just hours or a day. Webcor estimates it has saved $20,000 in attorney salaries and $35,000 in IT staff salaries during just the first year of the solution’s deployment.

With Symantec Enterprise Vault with Discovery Accelerator, authorized reviewers can quickly target and pinpoint specific email and files as part of litigation support, legal discovery or investigation. Content can be tracked, reviewed and marked for lead counsel examination or court-ready production, which reduces the cost of electronic discovery by finding and qualifying relevant email quickly. Enterprise-wide searches can be made across archived content on a case-by-case basis, and searches can be based on multiple criteria.

The solution also makes quick work of reviewing and marking content, even if multiple reviewers are used. Legal holds against relevant emails or files can be automatically applied to make sure they are not deleted. Then, once a case is closed, all holds on it are released and the documents revert to their originally scheduled deletion dates.

Archiving and Classification
According to Webcor, Symantec Enterprise Vault is also vital for managing the company’s Exchange mailboxes. Users had been keeping years of messages in their Outlook mailboxes and found it increasingly difficult to actually locate relevant information using Outlook’s built-in search mechanism. What’s more, delays in being able to find and produce information about projects from multiple construction sites had become unacceptable.

The intelligent archiving solution enabled the company to eliminate these problems. With it, users can have mailboxes of virtually unlimited size while the growth of storage resources remains controlled. Administrator-defined policies automatically archive individual mailbox email and attachments out of Exchange and into online archiving stores.

Because this system automatically classifies messages, it removes such decision-making from employees and IT staff. Moreover, archived content is presented back to employees just as non-archived content is—the only difference is a small icon that identifies archived items.

By automatically managing the email cycle from composition to deletion, Symantec Enterprise Vault dramatically reduced Exchange message store sizes. Webcor saved $10,000 on additional servers and storage and $35,000 in additional staff management by using the intelligent archiving system. Better yet, the company added 100 more mailboxes in one year while maintaining the volume of email storage and without adding staff to manage the additional mail.

Intelligent archiving and discovery systems offer relief for organizations like Webcor that face increased pressure to store, manage and discover critical business information while meeting regulatory demands and budgetary constraints. With this set of efficient and cost-effective tools, businesses can be sure that the right content is retained in the right place for the right period and that it is available to the right people at the right time.

Gregg Davis is senior vice president and CIO for Webcor Builders Inc.
www.Webcor.com
www.symantec.com