Mimosa Systems NearPoint 3.0

Score: 4.5 out of 5
Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.

NearPoint is a serious enterprise-class message archiving system that offers a unique advantage in its continuous archiving capability and self-service restores, in addition to its list of the standard high-end features such as very granular permissions, flexibility in granting rights to a variety of roles such as auditor, administrator or HR reviewer, and a database system that can scale to multiple servers and multiple archives. While it is not inexpensive, it's hard to beat for functionality.

The continuous archiving feature of Mimosa ensures that when e-mails in a user's in-box are changed, or moved to different folders, that the changed version is also archived (the original is preserved too). This provides the ability to recover any version of an e-mail from the first one received to any subsequent version, for change management, or to give users the ability to go back to an earlier version if desired, or for legal discovery, to make a complete chain of evidence.

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Score: 4.5 out of 5
Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.

NearPoint is a serious enterprise-class message archiving system that offers a unique advantage in its continuous archiving capability and self-service restores, in addition to its list of the standard high-end features such as very granular permissions, flexibility in granting rights to a variety of roles such as auditor, administrator or HR reviewer, and a database system that can scale to multiple servers and multiple archives. While it is not inexpensive, it's hard to beat for functionality.

The continuous archiving feature of Mimosa ensures that when e-mails in a user's in-box are changed, or moved to different folders, that the changed version is also archived (the original is preserved too). This provides the ability to recover any version of an e-mail from the first one received to any subsequent version, for change management, or to give users the ability to go back to an earlier version if desired, or for legal discovery, to make a complete chain of evidence.

The NearPoint system is a full-on enterprise-class system with the capacity to handle thousands of mailboxes and multiple Exchange servers. All components could be installed on a single server, or there could be four or five separate servers, a presentation/Web server, one or more database servers, an indexing server and the Exchange server. Mimosa sent two Dell PowerEdge 2950 Windows servers, one running its NearPoint software and one running Microsoft SQL server. This configuration was done solely to streamline the review process. Configuring the service accounts in Active Directory, creating the necessary mailboxes on the Exchange server, granting the accounts the appropriate rights to all mailboxes to be archived, setting up a share on the Exchange server took a while, though the process was well documented.

The Mimosa system offers a full array of functionality, including mailbox size management, discovery and archiving of local PST files, e-discovery and disaster recovery. It offers an excellent, granular permission structure for granting an auditor or e-discovery technician the necessary rights to peruse messages and create auditing reports. Searching and accessing archived e-mails through Outlook or the included Web interface is transparent and the self-service option for finding and restoring accidentally deleted e-mails works very well. E-mail is archived when it comes in, as well and when any changes are made to it separately, so users can recover the original message or the most recent version of an e-mail or is attachments.

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