* The Maltese archiver
GFI Software, based in the island nation of Malta, has just introduced MailArchiver for Exchange, designed to allow an organization to archive all of its external and internal e-mail in an SQL database and make this content available to end users.
MailArchiver for Exchange takes advantage of the journaling feature in Exchange as its archiving mechanism, compressing attachments to e-mail messages and then archiving all messages and attachments in an SQL database. The advantage of storing e-mail and attachments in an SQL database are several, including the improvement in compression efficiency of SQL vs. PST files and the ability to search the archive via a Web interface.
MailArchiver for Exchange is quite inexpensive; it starts at $7 per mailbox ($350 for a 50-mailbox license) and drops from there ($1,250 for an unlimited number of users).
As is the case with most archiving products, MailArchiver provides a number of advantages to an organization: it helps the organization comply with the growing number of regulations for data retention; it helps to satisfy legal discovery requests; it reduces the amount of storage needed on Exchange servers, helping them to run more efficiently; it allows users to mine the archive for old information; and it eliminates the need for end users to employ individual PST files to offload information from their mail stores. Any one of these reasons is probably justification enough for implementing an archiving system in most organizations.
I’ve been beating the archiving drum for quite a while, in large part because of a) the growing importance of preserving e-mail content for compliance and litigation support, and b) because most enterprise e-mail systems contain lots of valuable stuff that shouldn’t be purged every 30, 60 or 90 days. While individual users can save valuable content to individual PST files, file servers, etc., an archiving system makes their lives – and the lives of their IT folks – much easier.
