E-mail explosion

Archiving options

E-mail archiving software addresses not only storage headaches, but also compliance and discovery needs for many companies. "A court may order you to provide all the e-mails relating to a particular topic for several years," Osterman says. "You can't really do this with back-up tapes. The cost of finding and retrieving the e-mails would be extraordinary."

Construction company Webcor Builders installed Veritas Enterprise Vault e-mail archiving software in late 2002 for both reasons.

"We were having performance problems with our Exchange servers, says Gregg Davis, Webcor's CIO.

"We couldn't upgrade them fast enough. We had e-mail slowdowns too. The server would become unresponsive, and we'd have delivery delays." Everyday documents like building specs and contracts weren't getting any smaller. Simultaneously, regulatory requirements regarding documentation became stringent, Davis says. The Veritas software solved both problems, he says, taking the archived e-mail off the mail server, and offering search features necessary to round up particular e-mails when the company faced regulatory scrutiny or litigation.

Webcor's Exchange mail server is now holding its own, though the company has grown from 70 employees to close to 400. "We pretty much stopped having to expand our Exchange server," Davis says. Enterprise Vault "increased the pure efficiency of the thing".

Initially, Webcor was running Exchange 2000. The company rolled out Exchange 2003 between August and October 2005. Just before the rollout, Webcor upgraded Veritas Enterprise Vault to the newest available version to ensure compatibility.

Be realistic about your mail-server expectations, Davis says. "Exchange doesn't shrink. If your database is at 20GB and you deploy this, you'll stay at 20 instead of going to 25. You manage the growth."

When shopping for an e-mail archiving system, choose one that doesn't require users to change behaviour, Davis recommends. "Some other solutions require the users to do something with folders, categories or arranging mail a certain way," he says. "With Enterprise Vault, all you notice is an icon."

Veritas pricing depends on number of users and add-on modules; for mailbox archiving directly from users' in-boxes, it starts at $US14,719 for as many as 500 users and the base server licence. Davis spent about $20,000 initially and pays about $4000 per year in maintenance fees for Enterprise Vault and some add-on software modules.

Think carefully about the kind of searches your company will need to do on the archived e-mail. You want full-text indexing, which means you can search the message title, header info, message body and any attachments.

Archived e-mail that's not easily searchable could save space on your Exchange server now, but cause a major headache later, says Melanie Koch, controller and operations officer at ChemOne, a wholesaler and distributor of dry chemicals.

"We had a retention policy that no e-mails were deleted," Koch says. "We realized any discovery costs would be huge. From a business standpoint, we couldn't find all the documents we needed. Our Exchange server was overwhelmed, but just upgrading the Exchange server wouldn't solve the problem."

ChemOne turned to ZipLip, which makes a variety of mail archival and attachment management software: Koch installed ZipLip's Unified E-mail Archival Suite last October, choosing the product largely for the search features. For example, ChemOne sends many internal reports and documents around that have similar or identical names, so the company needed to easily narrow e-mail searches to particular date ranges, Koch says

ZipLip's products comply with Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), another factor to consider. If you choose an archiving solution with a proprietary format, then part ways with your archiving vendor a few years later, it could spell big trouble.

In addition, open standards such as MIME can prove key when companies acquire or merge divisions that may not be using the same mail and archiving solutions.

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