Organizations must balance the need for e-mail archives with the costs of storage, including the increasing difficulties that users face in finding their own messages when they leave their e-mail in undifferentiated electronic piles of ordure. Although e-mail indexing solutions such as Google Desktop may help users locate messages in years of unstructured archives, they don't solve the problem of random deletions that may have legal implications if the organization is served with subpoenas for all documents produced or received in specific data ranges.

Recently Osterman Research added to its extensive production of white papers with “A Guide to Understanding Messaging Archiving” which is available free through a simple registration process.

The 10-page paper begins with some interesting background information about the growing pressures on organizations to archive their e-mail (Compare Message Archiving products). For example, about a quarter of companies have received subpoenas for employee e-mail. Costs of producing e-mail from unstructured backups have ranged into the millions of dollars. About two-thirds of the managers surveyed in one study reported that the chief contributor to their messaging management headaches was storage of old messages.

The white paper presents the following sections and subtopics with one or more paragraphs of details for each:

* Reasons to Deploy Messaging Archiving Capabilities
- Legal Compliance
- Legal Holds
- Pre-Litigation Internal Review
- Other Legal Considerations
- Reducing the Impact of Storage
- Regulatory Compliance
- Knowledge Management

* Important Factors to Consider When Selecting an Archiving System
- Delivery Models
- Opportunity Costs
- Messaging Platform(s) Supported
- High Availability
- Scalability
- Ease-of-Use
- Extensibility for Non-Messaging Archiving

I think that readers will find the paper useful.

There are many other papers about messaging on the Osterman Research archive that may be of interest; a few of the more recent include:

* What to Ask When Evaluating Messaging Security Systems – April 2008
* The Impact of Messaging and Web Threats – April 2008
* Why Should You Archive Your Email With a Hosted Service? – January 2008
* Key Issues in Messaging Mobility – October 2007
* Archiving Email for Compliance and Competitive Advantage – September 2007
* Reducing the Load on Email Servers – September 2007
* A Guide to Understanding Hosted and Managed Messaging – August 2007
* Why You Should Be Thinking About Archiving – June 2007
* Emerging Trends in Fighting Spam – June 2007
* Why Your Organization Needs to Focus on Outbound Content – May 2007
* The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, E-mail Discovery and You – March 2007
* Why Organizations Need to Focus on Outbound Security – February 2007

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services. CV online.