The Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging (ADAM) is a simple install compared to some of the others tested. There is one single installer application and requires no extra components pre-installed into Windows. The set up process comprises only a couple of simple configuration items, such as creating a journaling account and enabling journaling, and configuring the SMTP connector the system uses to forward email to the archiving server. The included installation support was hardly necessary.
Head: Score: 4.125 out of 5Editor’s note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, see a full rundown of how it fared in our testing.
The Atempo Digital Archive for Messaging (ADAM) is a simple install compared with some of the others tested. There is one single installer application and requires no extra components pre-installed into Windows. The set up process comprises only a couple of simple configuration items, such as creating a journaling account and enabling journaling, and configuring the SMTP connector the system uses to forward e-mail to the archiving server. The included installation support was hardly necessary.
The system supports importing e-mail into the archive through a wide variety of file formats, including PST, .eml, Exchange mailbox, Mbox, MSG or Maildir. ADAM supports a variety of operating systems and mail servers beyond Exchange, and other forms of communication such as faxes and instant messaging; therefore, making the system ideal for organizations with heterogeneous network environments. This wide support makes the product ideal for consolidating several different mail servers in a single archive.
In the test in which we archived all the messages in the 3.2GB Exchange 2003 e-mail store required setting up an archiving rule that specified archiving all messages in the test mailbox which were over 10 minutes old. Once the rule was created, the job could be run at a specified time or run immediately. Atempo combines archiving and indexing, while some others archive and then index, but the times recorded for this test were for a complete job of archiving and indexing, so products that archive first and then index don’t get a faster time because the archive isn’t ready to be searched until indexing is complete.
ADAM also offers very granular control over discovery processes and administrator rights. Searches can be of one mailbox, a group, an entire domain (yourcomany.com) or multiple domains. Auditors can be granted several levels of permissions for searching messages or creating reports – one person can be designated to create reports but not read them, for instance, and a different person can be granted rights to actually review the reports. Search results can be exported to text files or PST files that can then be imported into Outlook for easier review.
The administrative and search interfaces are easy to use, although they were displayed the best inside of IE7, and less so effectively in IE6 or Firefox. Searches were very quick, returning even complex results in less than a second.
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