Success Stories

At the Law firm Pattishall, McAuliffe, they are using GWAVA Retain product as a solution to archive their emails and data.

“What’s nice about the Retain product is that everything is stored in a SQL database. That makes everything easy to back up and it’s simple to pull data back out of.”Dale Qualls, IT Director Pattishall, McAuliffe

Keeping Emails Legal

In Chicago, the intellectual property law firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe, Newbury, Hilliard & Geraldson LLP is especially mindful of the need to produce email in the discovery process. Email has become one of the primary means of communication and when a legal issue comes up, email is one of the first things that needs to be reviewed. As a law firm, they want to make sure that their emails and attached data are properly archived and easily retrievable.While everyone at the law firm would love to keep all of their email forever in their inboxes, it simply isn’t practical. Especially because nearly every email has attached documents. But still, old email and data needs to be accessible. For that reason, Pattishall, McAuliffe needed archiving software to provide quick access to old emails and support their retention and email retrieval policy.

Their Challenge 

Dale Qualls, Director of Information Technology for Pattishall, McAuliffe, explains that they use GroupWise 7.02 on a single server, running on NetWare and are moving soon to a Linux platform. There are about 90 users, but huge amounts of data being sent through the post office have bloated it to around 200 GB. All of their systems are running virtualized.  Dale explains that recent federal rules of civil procedure in the United States make it imperative that email be produced during the discovery process not only in archived or printed data, but in a mutually-agreed upon readable digital format. Gone are the days when the burden of unarchiving material fell onto the one requesting the discovery information. There are now specific rules on how to preserve data and how to present it as well. Discovery data now needs to be portable so it can be put into litigation support software, indexed and referenced.

Implementing an Archive Solution

In the beginning, Dale purchased an archiving solution other than Retain. With that solution, he had to purchase another copy of Windows Server 2003 and virtualize the software. He found that the archiving solution ran extremely slowly and inefficiently. Convinced there had to be a better option, Dale found an evaluation copy of Retain, ran it on a virtualized SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) box and was thrilled with how efficiently it ran. Now he had the portability he wanted and the speed and reliability of the virtual machines as well. Dale was pleased that Retain runs on native Linux since Linux is an easy, low-cost solution that works well. Not only that, but Retain runs on any platform, so you have a choice.Another plus for Dale is that Retain stores its archived data in a SQL database. SQL adds an extra layer of security. For example, if someone were to steal the hard drive storing the archived data, it would be much more difficult for them to access the data than if it were stored in XML.

Set It and Forget

Retain has given Dale a confident outlook on the way the law firm’s archived data is stored. He doesn’t worry about a Windows server crashing and taking everything with it. For him, Retain is a “set it and forget it” solution. He gets progress reports on a regular basis which assure him that everything is running as it should and notifications if anything goes wrong. It runs by itself and there’s no need to worry or think about it.With Retain, both the law firm of Pattishall, McAuliffe and its clients are protected. They trust that they won’t be sanctioned by the court for failure to comply with the federal rules of civil procedure, which could cost them a great deal of money. Archive To Go which creates a pre-packaged disk with relevant data and a viewer makes it easy to provide searchable discovery data from Retain data. Plus, Retain’s web interface provides another way to access archived data securely and easily within the firm.

“One of the things I like best about Retain is the easy web interface. It’s smooth and easy to run through. It gives good feedback on how a job is progressing. Not only that, but GWAVA has some of the biggest names in GroupWise email working on their products.”

Dale Qualls, IT Director
Pattishall, McAuliffe 

About GWAVA Retain

Retain is the only GroupWise-specific archiving solution which, through SOAP, is fully customizable and able to capture every single email that flows in and out of your GroupWise post offices.