Policy Patrol Case Study

Company background

The Museum of London was established in 1975, by the merger of the London Museum and the Guildhall Museum. The Museum’s collections include over a million items and represent a quarter of a million years of history and over seven million modern Londoners. As well as the main Museum in the heart of the City of London, the Museum of London Group also operates the Museum in the Docklands and has its own Archaeological Service. In total the group has 500 employees.

Business challenge

The Museum of London’s business challenge was two-fold; The Museum wanted to optimize its email and Internet resources and at the same time exercise more control over the image conveyed in their email communications. Also, the Museum was becoming increasingly concerned about the many offensive emails that employees were receiving, and wanted to find a way in which to protect their staff from embarrassment.

Consolidate image

Since employees were creating their own email signatures, the Museum of London had no control over their content and the image they conveyed. Therefore the Museum wanted to standardize signatures to fit in with the company's design standards.

Promotional opportunity

The Museum of London organizes numerous exhibitions, events and classes during the year. The marketing department wanted to capitalize on promotional opportunities and include information about upcoming exhibitions in the email signatures of their staff. In this way, customers and business relations would automatically be kept up to date on the latest events organized by the Museum.

Minimize productivity drain

The Museum of London was having to cope with an increasing amount of junk mail, placing a considerable drain on employees’ time. The Museum was also concerned that the sometimes plainly offensive spam mails were causing embarrassment amongst their staff and negatively influencing the Museum’s work environment.

Optimize email resources

Since email usage and the deluge of spam were increasing every day, the Museum was looking for ways in which to cope with the growing email load whilst avoiding the need for expanding the capacity of their email and Internet systems.

Solution

Faced with the above requirements, Richard May, Network Manager of the Museum of London, set about to find a product that could not only block junk mail and reduce bandwidth and storage usage, but also centrally add user specific signatures that could be utilized for promotional purposes. Over a period of a couple of months, Richard May evaluated several products and decided that Policy Patrol was the best fit for their needs: ‘Policy Patrol provided the best range of features to add in to Exchange Server. Although other products offered certain features as well, none covered all of our requirements in one package.’

The Museum of London applies Policy Patrol in the following ways:

Signatures

The Museum uses Policy Patrol to add signatures (including company logo) at server level, therefore ensuring the signature complies with the Museum’s design standards. Since Policy Patrol allows you to create one global signature that is individualized by using merge fields from the Active Directory, the product enables the Museum to easily include promotional text that changes frequently. Finally, Policy Patrol adds signatures to internal as well as external mails at server level, avoiding the need for users to add a signature to any of their emails.

Anti-spam

The Museum of London makes use of Policy Patrol’s extensive anti spam features including Bayesian filtering, real-time black lists, header and keyword filtering, remote image blocking and recipient verification. By using recipient verification and real-time black lists, the Museum can reject spam before it is even downloaded.

Compression

Policy Patrol compresses all the Museum’s externally sent attachments that are greater than 10 MB.

Benefits

Through their use of Policy Patrol, the Museum enjoys the following business benefits:

Increased employee productivity

By blocking spam mails, Policy Patrol has greatly improved the Museum’s employee productivity levels. Richard May: ‘Policy Patrol tags 1 out of every 4 messages as spam, therefore substantially reducing the time that our employees spend sifting through their emails each day’.

Reduction in bandwidth and storage usage

Policy Patrol saves the Museum’s bandwidth resources by rejecting junk mail before it is downloaded. Furthermore the program reduces the amount of emails received on the system and therefore decreases the amount of storage space needed. Finally, by compressing large attachments, Policy Patrol helps the Museum avoid network congestion as well as reduce bandwidth usage and storage space.

Safe working environment

By blocking offensive emails, Policy Patrol avoids staff embarrassment and helps the company provide a safe and friendly working environment.

Consolidate professional image

Since Policy Patrol allows the Museum to add signatures centrally, the Museum can now exercise control over the professional image conveyed in their email communications.

Utilize promotional opportunity

Policy Patrol has enabled the Museum to easily utilize their emails for promoting seasonal events. Richard May: ‘Thanks to Policy Patrol’s ability to use Active Directory merge fields, the product not only allows us to create one global signature that is customized for each employee, it also allows the Museum to effortlessly change promotional texts announcing new events and exhibitions’.