Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Ensures Compliance and Litigation Readiness with Messaging Architects’ Email Archiving and eDiscovery Solution

Edinburgh, UK (Vocus) November 1, 2010

Messaging Architects, global experts in email risk management, announced today that for over a year Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality has relied on M+Archive to ensure the municipality meets the requirements for compliant email retention and secure, efficient and inexpensive electronic discovery. One of the six category A municipalities in South Africa, Nelson Mandela Bay has a staff of 4,000 employees that serves a population of over 1 million people.

As a local government agency, Nelson Mandela Bay has to comply with South Africa’s Provincial Archives and Records Service Act. Other regulations that affect email retention and storage include the Access to Information Act of 2000, which requires that all email be retained for at least three years, and legislation governing electronic communications and transactions, in effect since 2002. The new legislation prompted the Nelson Mandela Bay leadership to adopt email archiving at the municipal messaging system. The goal was to simplify email management while remaining compliant and able to access email records.

Nelson Mandela Bay selected M+Archive because of the solution's full set of capabilities that allowed them to implement an efficient email lifecycle management strategy. The fact that M+Archive was designed to seamlessly integrate with the municipality’s Novell GroupWise system was also essential. Moreover, Messaging Architects' extensive GroupWise expertise and in-house resources ensured the municipality had the type of support required for such a business critical project.

“We had several challenges we wanted to solve by deploying email archiving. We wanted to facilitate information discovery, to enforce email retention policies according to organisational structure and employee function, and to ensure the integrity of the retained messages,” said Gerrie Gerber, Assistant Director of Technical Services Section at Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. “Messaging Architects was able to offer a solution that delivered on every one of our specific needs.”

Messaging Architects worked closely with respected South African technology partners BCX and NetCB and the Nelson Mandela Bay IT Department to design and deploy the email archiving architecture. M+Archive enables Nelson Mandela Bay to automate the search and retrieval of archived email, to keep decentralized tamper-proof secure archives across several sites, and to store archived email messages in an industry standard format that eliminates dependencies on proprietary technologies.

“Nelson Mandela Bay had challenges related to storage, preservation, retrieval, auditing, and disposal of information that had to be solved as contemplated in current South African legislation,” explained Gary Lessels, Director of the Messaging Architects UK Office. "We are extremely pleased we were able to come up with the right solution for them on every count. Nelson Mandela Bay can certainly serve as a model for other municipalities in their approach to improving email management efficiency and employee productivity."

About Messaging Architects
100% employee-owned, Messaging Architects is a global builder of business driven Email infrastructure. We provide software and services that deliver 100% uptime and compliance to millions of end users. Our M+Platform manages the full lifecycle of email – from the moment a message is created through its end of life destruction. M+Platform components scale seamlessly and work together to minimize costs, reduce complexity and eliminate risk. For more information, visit our website.

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