Why You Need It

Everyday your Domino servers take in more email than is deleted. Everyday your disk drives have less free space and Domino works harder because of it. Everyday this increase in email exponentially affects the work required if legal discovery is requested.

Everyday your users and admins spend more time waiting for Domino to respond and less time working.

Adding more hard drives and Domino servers only delay the inevitable problem and clustering won't help at all. Only by purging old, unneeded email can you mitigate the risks of server outages and corrupt email databases caused by low disk space, arduous email legal discovery requests, and out-of-compliance email usage.  Creating and maintaining a fault-tolerant Domino environment is not always easy. Ensuring that old email does not bring it to its knees is.

Wasted Resources

Massive quantities of email move through the Internet daily. When this email is left to sit in inboxes, folders, and the trash it consumes precious Domino server and personnel resources.

Domino server
The most obvious wasted resource is disk space. Though disk drive prices are relatively low, many operating systems have a limit on partition size. Of more concern is the limit on how large a file can be before the OS can no longer access it, which is much lower than the partition limit.

Furthermore, the larger the file, the longer the CPU will take to process it. Everything from opening the database to running standard Domino maintenance such as fixup, updall, and compact will consume more CPU cycles which could be better used to process user requests.

Personnel
Every extra second Domino takes to process user requests, the number of lost productivity hours adds up. Consider this:

In an organization with 5,000 employees, if the average user opens and closes their email database twice per day (once in the morning and once when coming back from lunch), for each extra second that Domino takes to process that request the company loses 722 man-hours per year.

1 second per database open X 2 database opens per day = 2 seconds lost
2 seconds X 5,000 employees = 10,000 seconds lost
10,000 seconds = 2.77 hours lost
2.77 hours X 5 days per week = 13.88 hours lost
13.88 hours X 52 weeks per year = 722.2 hours lost

What could your employees be doing with an extra 722 hours per year?

Data Cleanup

No matter the size of your organization, one of the most arduous tasks an administrator can perform is a data cleanup. As hard as the organization might try to remind user’s with access to sensitive data that they are not allowed to discuss it via email, they will forget.

Cleaning up after a sensitive email data “spill” can take several employees hours to complete. Besides the obvious cost in time and loss of productivity, the longer the sensitive data is in a user’s inbox, the more likely they are to read it or unknowingly forward the data. This not only increases the scale of contamination, it also makes it much more likely that the person in charge of manually scanning user’s mail databases will miss the forwarded email which stills leaves the organization vulnerable.

Logistic for Lotus Domino’s content and file attachment filtering can reduce these risks. A simple job configured to report on all emails containing the sensitive word, phrase, and/or file attachment will reveal just how far the contamination spread. Modifying the job to purge these emails will eliminate the contamination, regardless of how many people have forwarded or replied to the email.

Monetary Savings

Keeping your Domino email environment trimmed to only the emails that are necessary can save your organization in more ways than just hard disk expenditures. After all, the purchase of a hard disk requires a consultant or administrator to install the disk, format it, and prep it for data. On some systems it even requires server downtime. That once cheap hard drive is now costing several times more in consulting/personnel costs and outage time.

Once your operating system hits its partition limit you are now facing the even more costly proposition of buying a new server. But even that is temporary.

As described above, a 5,000 employee organization whose employees open their Domino email database twice per day loses 722 man-hours per year for every extra second Domino takes to respond. If the average employee makes $45,000 per year, that means the organization loses over $15,500 per year because Domino took one extra second to open user’s email databases. But what if your Domino server is taking three or four extra second right now?  Can you afford to continue losing $15,000, $30,000, $45,000, or even $100,000 or more?

Return on Investment

Your ROI comes in many forms.

- Saving your Domino server resources such as drive space and CPU cycles
- Less administrative overhead
- More productive employees
- A solid action plan for sensitive data leaks
- Tens of thousands of dollars saved
- Hundreds of man-hours reclaimed

From hard dollars and cents to more elusive personnel and Domino server resources, the greatest return might be the peace of mind in knowing that you have one less thing to worry about with your Domino environment.