Need to set groupwise policies

[Noor2000]

Hi Guys,
We have an environnement of 1300 users and our groupwise database (Groupwise 6.5)is now over 200 GB. We are considering to put some policies to control this problem and I need your opinions:

1-What kind of policies to set?

-Archive: If every user has to archive in his own home directory, How to set this automatically for more than 1000 users and is there any way to force archive because we couldn't rely on users to archive. They will never do it
-Set a limit to groupwise database for each user: are you using this option?
-We set the size to attachements to 25 Mo
2- I wanna also know what the disadvantages of letting the groupwise database grows like this without any control?

3-Any ideas, brainstorming of what we could do to solve this problem will be appreciated. We wanna do an expire of messages of more than 3 years.but how to make people working here for more than 10 years understand that they should change their way of working?

If some one is working in an environnement like ours, please tell me how are you handling this?

Thanks
Noor
TechnicalUser

 

[ITsmyfault]

I feel your pain. I have a paltry 25 users and about 40GB of mail.

Our users are much the same way. Save everything always.. storage is free, right? We used GWArchive to solve our problem here as we also have compliance regs to deal with. I force a publish everyday, and emails cannot be archived until after they are published (for compliance). We archive email on a 180 day rolling basis. YOu can view archived email via a C3PO plugin to the client.

I did not set database limits just bc I would get my head handed to me by sr mgt. I have enough pain as it is. They are some of the worst offenders in my case.

I limit attachments to 10MB. For the most part, there is no business purpose for attachments larger than this in the general flow of things. Get it smaller still if you can. Email is not an FTP server..

For long time folks, one advantage of an add-in system like GW arvchive is that mail gets published to xml and sorted by year and fid so you now have the ability to burn 1997-2001 emails onto a DVD for user X when they leave, or to take on the road or whatever.. and they can use the included xml browser to view/search etc.

I did not want to put archives in users home directories as this only spreads them out and would cause massive growth of that volume. I created a dedicated Archive NSS volume and centralized the process.

In the worst cases, I will go and speak to a user about thinning out their inbox or see if they have some kind of special problem we need to solve for them. Then I ask just politely keep on them about keeping the thing under control basically by telling them:
1 - they have X times the amount of email most folks have
2 - the more crap we store on the server, the slower it gets for everyone, the more $ to maintain (disks, backup, etc) and potentially the more reliability issues we could face.


JM2C... YMMV!

 

[Noor2000]

Thanks ITsmyfault for your reply. Yes that is a real pain what is going on in our groupwise database. But I wanna ask is there any way to get some statistics such as each user how much space is taking his own mailbox? can we speak about the disadvantages of letting groupwise database grwing like this?
I'm looking at this product GwArchive, but It is a big projetc espacially in an environnement where people they don't understand the meaning of space
Thanks
Noor(TechnicalUser)