The following opening to the Microsoft White Paper “Addressing E-mail Archiving and Discovery with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010” sets the context for thinking about archiving email in your environment:
“With businesses generating and sharing an ever-increasing volume of information through e-mail, the ability to protect and preserve these critical communications is essential. Whether your motivation is to improve storage management, meet regulatory requirements for data retention, or lower the costs of conducting electronic discovery (e-Discovery), implementing an effective e-mail archiving and discovery solution can offer a number of benefits.”
Some have considered their needs in terms of archiving, and in the past the only solution was to either archive older messages into local Microsoft® Outlook® Data Files (.PST files), removing important historical records from their Exchange Servers, or a third party solution. PST files are burdensome for IT to manage, are quite often stored on local machines that aren’t backed up, and have their own set of limitations in size, creating sprawl. Corruption of .PST files happens on a regular basis as they get larger, causing loss of data. If a client decided to use a third party solution, in some instances, this could require additional software to be purchased (such as SQL Server) to store the archived messages. It was also likely that users and administrators would need to learn new skills and client applications to search or access the archived messages. The new archiving capabilities built into Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 allow for administrators to manage archiving based on corporate policies, and personal archives created by users, directly from the same management interface they use for all other Exchange management.
Additionally, to help deliver a familiar user experience, the Personal Archive appears alongside primary mailbox folders in both Outlook and Outlook Web App. Just like any other folder or opened .PST file, your users can easily interact with archived e-mail using existing skills. For example, they can “drag and drop” e-mail messages to their Personal Archive, create folders, set flags, reply to messages, and even conduct searches across archived e-mail, all within Outlook and Outlook Web App. This greatly reduces the need for costly user training or additional support resources when rolling out a new archiving solution .
For more information on how your organization could benefit from upgrading to Exchange 2010, contact Phil Porreca at philip.porreca@thebtsgroup.com or call 425.749.9468.
