Score: 3.5 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.
Sunbelt Software generally offers SMB-oriented products for Exchange, including Exchange Archiver, an inexpensive but capable archiving tool. It works with the supplied SQL Express database, or can be deployed with full MS SQL Server or Oracle databases. This database supports the ability to scale from 50 to tens of thousands mailboxes, though its management capabilities and granularity of control probably won’t satisfy very large organizations
Installation is complex – which is somewhat surprising for a product targets for the SMB market — requiring ASP.Net, Microsoft Data Access Component, IIS and other Microsoft components to be installed before the software itself, as well as a database server, and the usual creation of accounts and assignment of rights. That said, the complicated process is well supported by Sunbelt’s documentation.
Exchange Archiver offers a capable set of features including single-instance storage, which means that if multiple users have the same message in their in-boxes, only one copy is kept on the archive server. This is also true of attachments, which can save a lot of space. Sunbelt also offers self-service message restore, automatic importation of PST file on users’ computers, excellent search capabilities, good scalability, and a choice to deploy full journaling or a less complex method of getting messages from the Exchange server to the archive server. The product also offers good e-discovery functionality, supports e-mail versioning to show changes for auditing and discovery purposes, and good reporting capabilities. An Outlook plug-in makes the end-user experience transparent while a Web portal designed to facilitate search and restore functions allows for fairly granular assignment of rights to an auditor.
While its database support is enterprise-class, most large organizations will probably be looking for more granular control of administrative and auditor rights, and a larger support organization. SMBs looking for a product that will scale up will be happy, but large enterprises will probably start with one of the top three products in the test.
Symantec’s Enterprise Vault wins top spot in 10-vendor test >
