Case Study: Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) achieves reliable GroupWise email disaster recovery and archiving with OpenText

In case of a catastrophe or a service interruption, PCS can rely on Micro Focus GroupWise Disaster Recovery to keep its email system running

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), the UK’s largest civil service trade union representing over 250,000 members, needed a reliable disaster recovery and archiving solution for its eight regional offices. Regions were relying on local db copies and tape backups with no central archiving or easy way to restore emails older than a day, leaving them vulnerable to data loss and service interruptions.

PCS deployed Micro Focus GroupWise Disaster Recovery alongside the Retain archiving solution, installing a small local server hosting three VMs (file sync, Retain worker, and GroupWise DR) to provide two weeks of local backups and link restores to the central archive. The products were installed and running within hours, archives and backups completed the next day, and testing confirmed smooth restores—giving PCS reliable failover, easier email retrieval, and renewed peace of mind.

Public and Commercial Services Union Groupwise

Andrew Simpson

Head of IT and Membership