What's This Archiving Thing?

By Oliver Rist, PCMag@Work

June 17, 2008

Yesterday, I mentioned a company called LiveOffice in the SMB Tech News Today post. LiveOffice was created to give SMBs sophisticated email archiving options typically reserved for the bigger enterprise guys. Subsequently, I got an email from "Robert" who asked why the hell he should worry about email archiving when it's really just another form of backup. Several responses there, Robert:

First: It's a blog, Robert. If you've got a question about the writing or my personal hygiene habits, use the Comments link below. That way, my editors see that someone's actually reading all this stuff and I get an iota of job security.

Second: Archiving and backup are not the same thing, No sirree. A backup is a static data dump of your whole message store dropped onto a mounted or just mountable volume elsewhere on the network--or in the cloud. An archive is a live and accessible mirror of your message store. That means every message, including all its attachments and metadata (CCs, replies, blind CCs--an audit trail in other words) is up and live in the production department--accessible and searchable if you've got the network creds.

Third: Why do this? Two big reasons and a myriad of little ones. The two biggies are knowledge base and compliance. Many companies are using their email stores (messages, public folders, schedules, etc.) as an in-house team knowledge store. Archiving lets them access historical data that the primary email system might have purged--also lets them keep working in case the primary fails.

Compliance is all about the lawyers. Talk to your corporate attorney and find out what would happen if you got sued. Some verticals are less prone to needing back email data than others; but those businesses in areas such as finance, health care, real estate, legal, and more will likely all need to refer back to email trails if you wind up in court.

But I can't stress that "talk to your lawyer" part of this post enough. Don't just find out if email archiving is a requirement. Find out what the best email archiving strategy is for your business. There may be great reasons for keeping everything forever; then again, there may also be really good reasons to lose it after two weeks.

Once you've figured out what needs to be archived, go to your IT department and figure out how to do it. Exchange administrators can actually manage this out of the box if you give them extra hardware--it's just a bit of a pain in the derrière. Fortunately, there are other options.

Companies like LiveOffice are one. Outsourcing your email archive is a highly viable choice and often the most cost effective. Just understand that if you do get sued in this model, the archive provider is on the legal ticket with you. Also, because archiving not only mirrors the live message store but also provides search tools, you want to make absolutely sure this provider is security-competent. Numerous vendors in this space, including Microsoft itself with its Hosted Archive option.

Last, there are dedicated email-archiving appliances from a variety of companies, including ArcMail, Intradyn, and Imation.among many others. Plug these guys into a network with a compatible email server (most times Exchange, but there are appliances for numerous others as well), and they'll discover the server, allow the admin to set up the archive parameters and kick-off the mirror. After that, they're updating in near real-time. Very cool and very nice to have in-house.

Hope that helped, Robert. Keep reading--and commenting.