MSExchangeGuru.com

Learn Exchange the Guru way !!!

 

GFI Mail Archiver – Best in market!!!

Archiving your data is at the forefront of every CIO’s mind. As the volume of enterprise data keeps growing voluminously, Businesses face the challenge of not just managing it but also archiving it. Storage has always been a concern for all spheres, thanks to its high maintenance cost.

Email Archiving isn’t just about archiving (ok let’s say backup as well) your emails anymore… Today it also deals with Governance, Compliance and Risk closely. Emails are more than bits and bytes being sent and received. It is the cornerstone of any business- as the corporate knowledge resides. Thus management of emails is a significant aspect.

GFI Mail Archiver is the next generation archiving solution architected explicitly for Emails. It doesn’t just restrict to compliance but has features leaps and bounds for e-discovery requirements. Let me run through you the key features of this product.

Compatibility:

It works well with all flavors of Exchange (2003, 2007, and 2010 along with Outlook integration). It provides a federal archive of all emails with both administration and user interface.

Installation:

Pre-checks: You would need the below components.

  1. IIS and ASP.NET should be present.
  2. Database: This database is the cream feature. Unlike other archiving solutions, which recommend to make changes in Exchange Server, GFI Mail Archiver takes it totally into itself by functioning with a database (SQL /Access (not recommended for production environments))

The installation is straight forward detecting the existing/ missing elements and proceeds till the installation is complete. Post this you would also need to establish connectivity between an enabled mailbox and Database, configuring the destination at which the mails should get archived. During this you can check options that you may like. Additionally if you would like complete end to end information, enable the journaling feature (BCC info also gets covered).

Post your installation, you could access it either through the client or web based browser- http://servername/MailArchiver.

The archiving settings/search can be done in this browser. It has five tabs as shown General, Database, Exchange Stores, Exclude and Licensing.

The General tab deals with all your mail archiving settings ranging from all inbounds, out-bounds, attachments.

The Database tab lets you manage your database (configuring and settings for Access/SQL)

The Exchange Stores is the place that you will use to confirm that the desired mailbox for archiving is getting archived.

The Exclude and Licensing tabs give you options for your desired models depending on the package you need.

Search Capabilities

Primarily companies do have backup policies for email, most of them have it as daily backups and yet it is always a pain to get a mail restored.

Let me a state a stat from a research – “An email admin requires close to 1.6 hours approx. on an avg. to restore an email if it’s recent and 10 hours approx. if it is more than a year old”. Again, there is a clause, it also doesn’t matter if the mail can be retrieved quickly from archive if the information in it doesn’t match or is not what you actually need. GFI Mail Archiver gives you the ability to search the full content of email messages and not just sender, subject or date alone. It lets you add multiple conditions to make your search not just easier but effective in few shots.

Overall…

Some of the features that really appealed to me, I would say is the sensitive understanding that has undergone in building this tool. It completely dabbles well with the fact that every organization is different and so are their needs. It is definitely flexible and does not circumference you with its capabilities, rather gives you multiple options.

Agility and access are vitally important but even more is retrieval of desired information. The Search capabilities are indeed a solid support. Email agility is of paramount significance.

With the exploding email traffic, admins need to have a better way to manage servers and networks to muster efficient performance. GFI Mail Archiver provides the seamless platform that merges the email lifecycle management facilitating a collaborative approach for all making good business sense.

So grab a copy and play with it and see for yourself. Download here

 

Leave a Reply

Categories

Archives

MSExchangeGuru.com