Automation lays foundation for smooth archive changeover for Rottendorf Pharma GmbH

Since 2015, companies have had a legal email retention obligation. This means that email archiving is no longer just part of professional risk management - companies are primarily complying with legal requirements. If a company wants to change its archiving system in compliance with the law, it is mandatory to restore the original emails with the attachments from the archive. For Rottendorf Pharma GmbH, the ECM experts of TIMETOACT GROUP have attached all file attachments from the archive to the corresponding e-mails in the mailing system. This was done automatically and with little manual effort using the specially developed Notes tool "ArchiveUsers".

Initial situation:
  • Decision to switch to a new archiving system
  • High manual effort required to switch without data loss

Core requirement: Automated reattachment of archived files from the archive to the corresponding e-mails

  • Use of "ArchivUsers" as a tool developed in-house by TIMETOACT on the basis of Notes
  • Automated recovery of original mails with low manual effort and transparency
Added value:
  • Full service by TIMETOACT
  • Reattachment of attachments from the Notes archive to the corresponding e-mail in the mail system
  • Report of successfully recovered attachments and attachments that cannot be recovered (error listing)
  • Low manual effort on the part of Rottendorf Pharma GmbH

It was the right decision to commission TIMETOACT GROUP again. Our positive experience has been confirmed once again and we are very satisfied with the result.

Project Manager at Rottendorf Pharma GmbH

Linking of 4.5 terabytes of archived file attachments

When using e-mail archiving, attachments to mailings are stored in a separate archive system and made accessible by means of a link. In addition to meeting legal requirements, companies also protect themselves against e-mail data loss and save storage space on the mail server. Rottendorf Pharma GmbH uses the "ContentManager" archive for this purpose, which contains file attachments from the mailboxes of over 800 users. Communication between the e-mail system and the archive is ensured by the product CommonStore for Lotus Domino (CSLD).

As part of a newly established digitization strategy, the pharmaceutical company decided to switch to a different archiving system. The problem: When switching, the interface between the e-mail system and the archive is lost, and with it the connection of the archived file attachments to the corresponding e-mail. To prevent this loss of data, a high level of manual effort is required.

The core requirement

The core requirement to enable Rottendorf Pharma GmbH to smoothly switch to a new archiving system was to re-attach archived files from the archive to the corresponding emails with as little manual effort as possible. This involved a total of 4.5 TB storage volume of file attachments.

Automation and transparency in the project

In addition to restoring the original emails, it was particularly important to us that the project be carried out as automatically as possible.

Employees at Rottendorf Pharma GmbH

This included keeping the manual effort on the part of the pharmaceutical company as low as possible. In addition to automatic execution, transparency also played a major role in the project. Although the overall control lay with the TIMETOACT GROUP, employees of Rottendorf Pharma GmbH should have the possibility to inform themselves about the progress of the project easily and quickly at any time.

The in-house development "ArchiveUsers" reduces the overall effort

The experts at TIMETOACT GROUP have already mastered the challenge of reattaching all attachments from the archive to the corresponding e-mails in numerous customer projects. For this purpose, the tool "ArchiveUsers" was specially developed on the basis of Notes for the automatic recovery of the original e-mails with a comfortable administration interface. The interface enables both the developers of TIMETOACT GROUP and the customer to keep an eye on the progress of the project.

What is ArchiveUsers?

ArchiveUsers is an in-house development for mail migration from Notes. The toolset serves as a basis for a new customer situation and is then adapted to the customer's individual requirements. The tool enables batch processing of mail databases and ensures error-free and complete mail migration.

Full Service of the TIMETOACT GROUP

Rottendorf Pharma and TIMETOACT GROUP have been working together since 2013. In an initial project, the Cologne-based IT group already provided support for data migration between different storage systems. In 2018, the "ArchiveUsers" tool was used for the first time in the recovery of mail attachments from the archive. Two years later, the same toolset was used to reattach the file attachments of the remaining source mails of the pharmaceutical company in Germany.

TIMETOACT GROUP took over the support and control of the entire process. With the help of the "ArchiveUsers" tool, all file attachments were reattached to the original emails without data loss. Successfully recovered data was deleted from the archive, which on the one hand resulted in more space being available again in the archive memory, and on the other hand made it possible to check whether all attachments had been transferred. Due to the many years of experience on the subject of e-mail archiving, the full service also included the processing and solution of any problems that arose. Since there were some documents that could not be reattached with "ArchiveUsers", employees of the pharmaceutical company occasionally had to decide manually which file attachments were still needed.

In summary, the following were implemented as part of the project:

  • Reattachment of attachments from the Notes archive to the corresponding email in the mail system.
  • Report of successfully recovered attachments
  • Report of attachments that could not be recovered (error listing)
  • Overview of mailboxes and number of archived and recovered attachments
  • Automatic error correction in case of errors in the database and in the archiving software
  • Automatic e-mailing to users with a list of documents to be manually cleaned up

Rottendorf Pharma is one of the leading contract manufacturers and developers and has been active for more than 90 years in the production and packaging as well as the development of formulations and analytical processes for solid oral dosage forms for the international pharmaceutical industry. The company produces more than 600 original and generic drug products annually. These include large, small, virtual and global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Feel free to contact me!

Frank Trila
TIMETOACT Software & Consulting GmbHContact