North Warwickshire Council Customer Story

North Warwickshire Borough Council originally purchased Cryoserver as an email archiving tool to help deal with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Today the council has seen Cryoserver develop into an extremely popular day-to-day tool, used by the entire council; more than 300 people.

Email Archiving Problems & Solutions

1. Freedom of Information requests and searches were taking too long

The IT department at North Warwickshire had found themselves having to deal with these requests all too often. These requests came with strict time pressures, that Gary and his department were keen to limit.

Cryoserver met North Warwickshire’s needs perfectly. “We’ve found ourselves using Cryoserver a lot for regulating staff using the email system, for example if somebody were to send an email to our contact centre to put in a complaint. The beauty is that if Cryoserver has no record of it then you can categorically say it didn’t happen. We can feel 100% confident that what happened on Cryoserver is exactly what happened. Our use of Cryoserver has gone more from an official FOI tool to a more day to day tool which has evidence and proof of company actions.”

2. Inaccurate, slow and difficult to search email system

The council and its users couldn’t be sure of the information they were finding, and were disappointed with the speed of the process. Lost emails were causing issues for all users within the council, whatever their job role.

Cryoserver provided a way to stop employees having to waste time sorting and then searching through folders manually by implementing a Cryoserver solution into their IT infrastructure: “The big plus point for me personally, and a lot of other staff, is that you no longer have to be quite so concerned about which emails you keep and which you discard. So I now have folders which I keep important emails in, in theory now I could delete those and still know I had access to them.”

Since purchasing Cryoserver North Warwickshire have found a variety of useful functionality that’s changed their day to day habits for the better: “If you’re not the most organised person, having Cryoserver there helps you by letting you know you can get to the data quickly no matter where you put it. I would recommend Cryoserver, it’s a software we flagged as something we really wanted to keep.”

Cryoserver has been transformed from a specific search and retrieval tool into a day to day part of business life for many of the organisation’s users. Cryoserver allows the council to perform speedy FOI and eDiscovery with fully audited access, and provides added productivity gains for the organisation as a whole.