Spectrum Engineers

The challenge

On a $90 million resort project, Spectrum was subpoenaed to produce every email from the job. Staff had worked on it for years. Some had since left the firm. Dave Wesemann, President and CEO, went from person to person gathering emails from individual archives, ultimately submitting 30,000 to 40,000 emails. 

Then opposing counsel produced emails sent from Spectrum's own office that weren't in the batch. Dave describes it: "Try gathering up all the emails in your firm on any project. It's like taking a bag of feathers, throwing it into the wind, and then trying to go gather all those up." 

That was the moment Spectrum knew they needed a proper system. 

The solution

Spectrum had used Newforma for email filing for five or six years. It worked but the filing and search functions were cumbersome. When Ideagen Mail Manager demonstrated their system, Dave knew immediately it was what they had been looking for. 

The concern was legacy data: between 700,000 and 750,000 emails already sat in Newforma's structure. Ideagen Mail Manager team said they could migrate everything across. Dave was skeptical. They did it, creating a single unified archive accessible through one search interface. 

Rather than switching everyone on at once, Spectrum ran a 30-day onboarding process. Dave tested the system himself for a full week first. Training then rolled out through a series of sessions, recorded videos and links to Ideagen Mail Manager YouTube tutorials. By launch day, the filing pathways were tested and everyone had been trained. As Dave puts it: "We almost had like a countdown, okay, four days, three days, two... ready, go." 

The results

Around 90% of employees adopted the system immediately. The remaining holdouts came on board within two or three months, typically after needing to run a search and discovering how long it would have taken them without Ideagen Mail Manager. 

The archive now exceeds 1.4 million emails. The real proof came on the new Utah State Prison, a billion-dollar project in Utah involving several architectural firms, engineering firms and multiple general contractors. When disputes arose over who had directed what, Dave searched the project archive. "There's been more than one occasion where there's been a dispute over who said what and who told who to do what," he explains. 

Key outcomes

• 700,000 to 750,000 Newforma emails migrated into a single unified archive 
• 1.4 million emails now searchable across the entire company or by individual project 
• Mailboxes reduced from 50GB+ removing the barrier to a Microsoft 365 migration 
• ~90% adoption from day one; full adoption within two to three months 
• Deduplication prevents storage bloat when multiple recipients file the same email 
• Personal emails filed to confidential folders not visible in company-wide searches 
• Ideagen's Mail Manager training built into new employee onboarding 

What this means for firms like yours 

When a project spans years and involves many team members, the email record is only as complete as the least disciplined person on the job. When that person leaves, their correspondence goes with them. 

The $90 million subpoena made that risk real for Spectrum. Even after years of inadequate systems, migration was possible. Hundreds of thousands of historical emails were unified into a single archive. Disputes on a billion-dollar project now resolve in seconds rather than weeks. 

1.4 million emails. Instant retrieval. No more feathers in the wind.