MessageOne adds e-mail management options

E-mail management service provider MessageOne this week is expected to add a range of hosted services that let customers outsource archiving, recovery and encryption while integrating them with their on-premise deployments of Microsoft Exchange.

The offerings extend MessageOne's Email Management Services (EMS) platform. The company also is adding an option for the Research in Motion BlackBerry to its Email Continuity service announced last year. The service ensures that e-mail flows regardless of any outages on the local e-mail environment. The original continuity service supports both Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino, but this week's new services are targeted initially only at Exchange.

"Compared to the complexity of clustering and outside data stores, which we have for other systems, this is a very simple and inexpensive solution," says Treg Russell, CIO of Texas Medical Liability Trust in Austin. Russell is in the process of building an Exchange cluster but plans to keep his MessageOne service. "It is an additional layer of protection," he says. "If you can get one cheap and have that extra security, it is worth doing."

Russell has added the archiving and BlackBerry services to his MessageOne menu.

"The one downside with this [Continuity] service is you did not have historical e-mail," he says. "Most people work off the e-mail they had yesterday or the day before." The archiving service gives Russell that trail and lets him set a time range when e-mail is archived on a per-group or user basis.

"This is not a complete disaster-recovery solution, but it can handle 95% to 99% of your needs," he says.

MessageOne, which competes with Microsoft's Exchange Hosted Services, Postini and MessageLabs, kicks in if the local Exchange environment goes down. E-mail is funneled to the MessageOne service and replicated back to the Exchange environment when it is restored. To integrate with the service, customers need to deploy a MessageOne synchronization engine behind their firewall and install agents on Exchange servers.

With the archiving service, MessageOne has included search and retrieval capabilities similar to those of online search engines. Users can see search results returned and refined as they type keywords into the browser interface. The archive service also supports nearly 400 types of attachments and provides a one-button restore feature for users retrieving e-mail.

The recovery service lets users recover lost e-mail by entering dates and times of an outage and the users, servers and storage groups affected. The service then packages the e-mail into a recovery archive, and users can restore the e-mail to their Exchange servers using EMS Recovery Manager

The encryption service provides encryption during transport and storage, and the BlackBerry continuity service is a failover for users of the mobile device that ensures they never are without e-mail.

The MessageOne platform is priced at $6 per user per month based on 250 users. The individual services are priced from $1 to $3 and 5GB of storage is $5.