Case Study for TOMY/RC2 Corporation
Company Profile
RC2 Corporation is a multi-national designer, producer, and marketer of high-quality, innovative
collectible, hobby, toy and infant products that are fun to own and use and encourage repeat
purchases. The Company’s diverse product offerings include collectible products, traditional
children’s toys and infant products. The Company sells through more than 25,000 retail outlets
located primarily in North America, Europe, and Pacific Asia. Brands include Thomas & Friends,
John Deere Kids, and Bob the Builder among others.
Business Problem
RC2 Corporation had been using Microsoft Exchange and was looking for a viable upgrade
path to Exchange 2003. Migrating large mail files significantly slows down this process. PST files
had also been created by a large number of users. RC2 wanted to eliminate PST files and still
have email accessible to their end users without an ever increasing storage requirement for the
mail store. RC2 has a large geographic distribution of locations across the US, UK, and China. Its
users needed email archived to more than one geographical location to minimize email retrieval
delays. Finally, RC2 anticipated the future need to email discovery to respond to litigation.
Our Solution
RC2 decided to use IBM Content Collector for Exchange product to archive e-mail and attachments into an IBM
Content Manager repository. IBM Content Collector for Exchange ingested RC2 users’ PST files and archived email
based on age of the message and whether or not it had attachments. Another benefit of the IBM
IBM Content Collector for Exchange product is Single Instance Storage (SIS), which is the ability to store a single copy
of an email message, with “pointers” to that specific email, rather than storing a separate copy for
each recipient. This function saved a significant amount of storage space when email is sent to a
large number of users. Using IBM Content Manager allowed the use of multiple content
repositories located close to the actual user location whether in Dyersville, IA, London or Hong
kong. This decentralized storage approach minimized potential email retrieval issues due to lack
of network bandwidth across continents.
For legal searches, RC2 decided to use IBM’s Email Search (EMS) product. It offered the
following benefits that complement the standard email archiving product including:
- Delivers advanced search and search result set refinement case folder
- International language support including traditional Chinese
- Allows hold management – a simple time-based planned management of email
- Supports audit trail exception reporting
- Adds a new feature to the IBM Content Collector for Exchange product by delivering an e-mail search client
- Includes an easier-to-use web interface that allows specific users (compliance and
litigation officers) to perform general discovery steps on e-mails stored in the IBM
Content Manager repository - Allows authorized agents (i.e. legal department, compliance officer, etc.) to search across
personal mailboxes - Locates business-critical e-mail records through advanced search features (To, From,
CC fields, as well as attachment content) - Responds to requests to demonstrate adherence to corporate-compliance plans
- Responds to legal requests for e-mail record discovery requests associated with litigation
- Creates result sets of e-mail records for analysis or transfer (i.e. to attorneys, courts, etc.)