The archive as the hub of messaging management

MessageOne this week made a significant announcement regarding some new products it is adding to its lineup of messaging management capabilities. This column will focus on one of those, the company’s Email Management Services (EMS) Email Archive, a managed service.

For a long time I’ve been discussing the need for organizations that are not in heavily regulated fields to at least consider archiving as a best practice. That’s because archiving provides a number of benefits to an organization, even if that organization has no specific statutory requirements to preserve information for regulatory audits and the like.

EMS Email Archive’s basic value proposition is to store all e-mail information in a single archive and then to use this information for a variety of applications to make e-mail systems run more efficiently. For example, the archive can be used as a source of information for compliance purposes, either for regulatory compliance or legal discovery. The archive can serve as a repository of e-mail for recovering lost messages with more capabilities than a restore from backup can provide. The archive can serve as a repository of corporate knowledge so that users can perform rapid searches across the archive. The archive can be used to reduce mailbox storage quotas so that e-mail servers can run more efficiently. The archive also ties into MessageOne’s continuity services for e-mail and BlackBerry services so that messages don’t bounce during period of e-mail server downtime.

MessageOne has elegantly put together a variety of services that uses an archive as the foundation of messaging management, instead of adding archiving as just an additional component to a messaging management system. It’s nothing really revolutionary, but more of a counter-conventional approach to the use of archiving. Using an archive for a variety of purposes to make IT, end users and messaging systems more efficient is a very good idea and one that most organizations should seriously consider.

Osterman Research will be hosting a Webinar, sponsored by MessageOne, to discuss the Osterman Research position on the benefits of archiving, and also to discuss MessageOne’s new offerings. The Webinar will be held on April 26 at 1 p.m. Eastern – you can sign up for the event on our Web site.