Increase Office Productivity through Technology         March 29, 2007
     
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Why Would You Need to Archive Corporate Email?
Archiving your corporate email for fast access to old email, and meet regulatory compliance.
You have already backup Exchange email regularly, why would you need to archive email?

‘Backup’ and ‘archival’ storage serve two different purposes. Backups are intended to save current data against the event of failure or disaster while archives protect data so that it can be accessed quick and easily when needed.

The cost of finding the electronic records for a discovery process can be astronomical, requiring months of IT manpower to wade through backup tapes. Email archiving systems provide advanced search and retrieval functions. These allow users to track down email messages in a timely and cost effective manner. Without an effective email archiving system, finding an email record is worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack.

An email archive is a repository generally kept in a non-productive environment to provide secure preservation of email for compliance and operational purposes. A ‘true’ email archiving system automatically extracts message contents and attachments from incoming/outgoing emails and after indexing, it stores them in read-only format. This ensures that archived records are original and authentic.

This proactive approach adopted by email archiving solutions ensures that you have a centralized and accessible copy of all its email. This provides additional protection against accidental or intentional deletion of emails by end users. Email archiving also eliminates the need to search for personal archives on each and every local machine whenever litigation support is requested.

Email archiving solutions allow administrators to setup access restrictions. These restrictions secure and protect intellectual property rights as well as ensure data integrity and confidentiality in compliance to the statutes.

There are four predominant reasons for an organization to archive its email. These are: Compliance, litigation support, storage management and knowledge management.

Compliance
The new regulatory environment is one of the major drivers behind the increase in demand for email archiving solutions. It is estimated that over 10,000 compliance regulations have been enacted around the world. More stringent controls and severe penalties are forcing organizations to address regulatory compliance more seriously.

 
Litigation support
Nearly all companies in the course of regular business activities become implicated in lawsuits. Litigation discovery is the process in which parties involved in a lawsuit are requested by the court of law to submit information which is relevant to the case.

 

Storage management
It is estimated that, one in every four organizations experiences a storage management growth in excess of 25% per year. This drastic escalation in storage requirements is mainly attributed to the increase in use of email in general, added to the upsurge of attachments, which increased the size of the average email from 22 KB to 350 KB. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 50% of organizations are providing more than 150 MB of storage per user. Organizations often make use of email storage quotas to prevent message stores from growing and degrading server performance. The downside of quotas is the effect they have on end user productivity. Apart from stopping users from using their email whenever their storage allowance is exceeded, quotas can have more serious implications. For instance, quotas and subsequent blockages might drive users to delete important messages from their mailbox in order to make room for new email.
 
Knowledge management
An organization’s email system is a corporate knowledge repository. It can contain vast quantities of useful email information which is often vital to a business and allowing access to this corporate asset can make users more productive.

An email archiving system can provide appropriate knowledge management tools (for example, email records sorting, advanced search and retrieval functions) that enable IT and end users to better manage the knowledge base contained in the company’s email archive.

Email archiving does not have to be expensive and complicated. GFI MailArchiver for Exchange is one of the most affordable yet powerful email archiving software for organization of all sizes.
Anyone who ever needed to access an email that has been deleted over a year ago knows the value of archiving. The hassles and process of having to find and then restore mailbox can take several hours, if not days.
Things don’t have to be this way with GFI MailArchiver, a message archiving solution that makes searching through internal and external email as simple as firing up your web browser and searching for the message in question.
Your mail server is not the ideal place to store all organizational email. GFI MailArchiver takes a different approach to archiving messages sent and received via your Exchange servers. It takes advantage of the archiving capabilities of Microsoft Exchange to send copies of all messages to a SQL Server database on your network. When you need to find a specific message to or from a particular user, all messages in a certain email exchange, or even all messages that contain a given text string, you can find what you want quickly. All you need to do is access the GFI MailArchiver web client, input your query, and let the SQL database handle the rest. All messages meeting your criteria will immediately be displayed, and the need to perform any type of restore a thing of the past.

GFI MailArchiver provides easy-to-use corporate email archiving, enabling you to centrally archive all internal and external email. GFI MailArchiver allows you to archive past, present and future emails into one or multiple databases, providing both the network administrator and employees with a number of benefits.

GFI MailArchiver for Exchange is easy yet powerful for both network administrator and end users.

Network administrators can now avoid the pains of PST file management and:
  • Eliminate corrupted PST files and the lengthy troublesome process of ‘fixing’ them
  • Overcome the risk of PST loss in the case of hardware failure on the employees’ workstations
  • Free yourself from complex backup plans to copy PST files from each employee’s workstation.

End users can perform the following actions without needing the assistance of a network administrator:

  • Use their browser to easily locate and access all their emails from anywhere in the world
  • Quickly restore emails back to their mailbox through a OneClick Restore process, avoiding the cumbersome process of retrieving an email from a backup tape or disk, saving the network administrator’s time.
The ability to quickly search for old email messages with impressive. The second reason why archiving messages is important is to comply with regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and many others. GFI MailArchiver is the perfect tool in this regard – all you’ll need to do is configure it to archive all messages, and then ensure that you back up the associated SQL Server database as required.

Even if your company isn’t public or subject to these regulations, message archiving is still important for legal reasons relating to business policies. GFI MailArchiver would provide the perfect way to quickly assemble the necessary information.

With increasing number incoming and outgoing emails each day, Exchange message stores grow over time. They can quickly become nearly unmanageable, and negatively impact server performance. By archiving all email messages in an external database, more stringent mailbox and message store cleanup/maintenance practices can be undertaken. The more efficient SQL Server database acts as your accessible message archive, while your Exchange servers benefit from a smaller message store, and better overall performance.

GFI MailArchiver can improve overall efficiency and productivity.
 
  • Reduce reliance on cumbersome PST files – prone to corruption, loss through hardware failure and requiring complex backup plans
 
  • Provide end-users with a single, web-based location in which to search and restore past emails through a OneClick Restore
 
  • Significantly reduce storage requirements for email by up to 80%
 
  • Increase Exchange performance and ease backup and restoration
 
  • Helps comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC and other regulations.

Multiple database support and ‘automatic’ database management support:  It is possible to archive emails in multiple databases – this fixed the problem of having one large database that becomes slow and requires more maintenance. GFI MailArchiver allows you to automatically archive emails to a new database after a specified time, for example, every month or quarter.

Reduce email storage requirements:  GFI MailArchiver compresses and decompresses attachments on the fly, which results in considerable savings in terms of storage when compared to storing attachments in the Exchange stores. In addition, storing email in a database is more space efficient than storing in PST files. An added advantage is that GFI MailArchiver archives only one copy of attachments sent to multiple recipients.

End PST hell:  Using GFI MailArchiver for Exchange eliminates the need for users to archive their mail in PST files on local hard disks. These PST files end up being very large and are difficult to backup and search. Many users do not know how to organize their PST files properly. With GFI MailArchiver, users can browse to the web search interface and retrieve past email from the database, rather than having to dig through a store of PST files on disk to find a particular email.

Set up email retention and categorization policies:  Setting up an email retention policy is critical and while email archiving is essential, retaining emails for an indefinite time is costly! With GFI MailArchiver you can create rules to delete one or more emails after a specific time, for example, you can delete all emails sent by the Marketing Department that are older than 7 years. In addition, GFI MailArchiver can help you to categorize emails by adding a label to the emails that meet a particular condition.

Access emails from any location through a browser:  GFI MailArchiver allows users to access their emails from anywhere in the world by using a browser. Emails that had been deleted may also be seen (and restored).

Advanced email search and 'Saved Search' capabilities:  Having a central store of email enables users to easily search through their past email and attachments (Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF, ZIP and many other formats). Once a search has been defined, the user has the possibility to save the search criteria for easy reference at a later date, similar to Microsoft Outlook Search Folders. For example, you may save a search that displays all email correspondence with client X.

OneClick Restore a single email to a mailbox:  By simply clicking on a button, the user or the administrator can restore an email to a user’s inbox in its original format. GFI MailArchiver restores any archived email (even deleted email) and these are resent to the user as an attachment.

Ability to search within email attachments:  GFI MailArchiver 4 also has the ability to search within email attachments in several formats including: Microsoft Word, Excel, PDF and ZIP and more.

‘Saved search’ support:  It is possible for each user to save their own search requests and to define a list of pre-set searches, for example, a user might decide to save a search that displays all email sent from a particular user.

Searching across multiple databases/archive volumes:  It is now possible to search across multiple databases/archive volumes at the same time.

Whether you’re looking to ensure that your company’s Exchange organization complies with regulatory requirements, or just a way to quickly retrieve email messages from the dark ages, GFI MailArchiver is worth taking for a test drive.
 
 
 
 
This month's top links:
www.GFI.com
www.exclaimer.com
www.spectorsoft.com
www.absolut.com
  
 
Visit our web site for more solutions - www.contek-office-tech.com
 
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