* Archiving isn't just for compliance purposes anymore
Archiving has traditionally been used for compliance purposes, often in the financial services industry. More recently though, archiving is being used for other applications like legal discovery. However, one of the most important benefits of archiving is helping organizations and individual users to more effectively manage their mailboxes while making them more productive at the same time.
For example, an archiving system can allow IT administrators to impose fairly strict mailbox quotas on users in order to optimize server performance, speed restoration from backups and maximize the number of mailboxes per server; while at the same time alleviating users from the requirement to move mail and attachments out of their mailbox to other storage in order to stay inside the quota limitation.
One of Mimosa Systems’ customers, e.Republic, is using archiving for exactly this purpose. After implementing NearPoint, mailbox sizes were reduced significantly as was the total storage devoted to Exchange. In addition, IT time was freed up by not having to manage mailbox quotas as rigorously. Before implementing NearPoint, users copied e-mail to local .PST files in order to stay within their quota limit, spending about one hour per month to do this. Now this task is handled automatically by replacing attachments with stub files that point to the attachments in the archive.
Considering just the savings that can come about from reducing user management of the mailbox in the example above, if we assume that the fully burdened annual salary for an e-mail user is $60,000, that means that an employer is losing $1,500 of productive time annually for every e-mail user. In an organization of 1,000 e-mail users, that represents a loss of $1.5 million in productivity every year.
Clearly, archiving is not just for compliance anymore. The technology can alleviate storage problems, one of the leading problems faced by IT managers in managing messaging systems, and it can make users much more productive.
