GFI MailArchiver – Got email? Then you need archiving
Business email systems have one design issue inherent in them which causes admins problems; users can delete messages. Deleting a message can cause all sorts of challenges to the business trying to maintain compliance and accountability, along with trying to maintain information availability. The answer to this problem is email archiving, and GFI MailArchiver is just the ticket for the small to medium enterprise looking to secure its messaging system from loss.
GFI MailArchiver offers several benefits to the business, the email administrator and the end user. Here’s a quick summary of just a few of these:
- For the business: it offers a cost effective way to archive any or all email messages, providing a solution for legal and regulatory compliance.
- For the admin: it offers tight integration with Exchange, easy deployment (physical or virtual), and can eliminate the need for PSTs.
- For the user: it offers easy to use search options, tight integration with Outlook, and an essentially unlimited mailbox.
Requirements
GFI MailArchiver can be installed on an Exchange server, or on its own server platform separate from your Exchange system. It is available in both 32 and 64 bit flavours, and can run on both Server 2003 and 2008. With modest hardware requirements (beyond sufficient disk space to meet your storage requirements), it can easily be introduced to almost any infrastructure.
Initial setup
Once installed, as the administrator you will be presented with a wizard to setup your first storage group. Of course you can make changes later on, but you should consider the storage requirements and retention policy(ies) you will need, and size your storage accordingly. I suggest you use a SAN that can be expanded over time, and don’t overlook the additional tape capacity an archive will requuire.
After setting up the storage group, a wizard will guide you through establishing an archiving policy. This includes creating rule to determine what is archived, assigning the users who will be archived, and setting a policy for how long their email will need to be archived. GFI MailArchiver is very powerful in this regard, as you can set multiple policies based on sender, receiver, subject, body content, etc. Do not believe that you can set a one size fits all policy for email archiving. HIPPA, HR, payroll, and PCI compliance will all influence your policies, but you may not want to archive email from your marketing team the same way.
PST Import
Wouldn’t it be nice to go get all those old emails sitting around in PST files and add them to your archive? Of course it would, and GFI MailArchiver has an excellent tool for importing PST files, both if they’re local or on network shares. By adding PST content into your archive, you can relieve your servers from stress, ensure data availability and search the content of these old messages. Plus, you’ll end the need for PST repair, and consolidate all the intellectual capital currently scattered across countless files stored on laptops, desktops, and file shares. Users will no longer have to mount multiple files in an unproductive search for that one old email that has the crucial piece of information they need.
Search
What? You didn’t know about search? That is one of my favourite things about GFI MailArchiver. Users can search their own archive (or anyone else’s to which they have permissions) for messages based on practically any criteria they could imagine, including inside attachments; even when they are compressed. And the best part is that they use a web portal.
The portal
GFI MailArchiver offers Microsoft Outlook integration, where one can access and search through the old archived emails via a separate mailbox. Additionally, a web interface is also provided as an alternate way to access messages in case someone wants to look for a recent message while you are patching the mailbox server. This “double-duty” feature adds some great value to an already impressive application.
Client Access
The portal is not the only way users can access archives. The Outlook Connector enables users to maintain an administrator configured cache of archived files for offline access. Unlike a PST, this cache is a client side copy of the data, which can be rebuilt as needed, and is completely managed by the server.
Summary
GFI MailArchiver offers great archiving, search, PST import, and user access to archives, while also supporting multiple retention policies. It is a great add-on to your Exchange infrastructure, and cabe dropped into place in an afternoon without introducing any changes to your email infrastructure. Check it out for yourself. You can download a free trial from here.
GFI is a paid advertiser on this website.
August 10th, 2011 at 6:30 pm
Your omitting a huge topic here, Exchange 2010 archiving.
I see value in most 3rd party tools for Exchange 2007 and earlier, but for Exchange 2010 the built-in archiving is going to be good enough for vast majority of companies out there. There is an additional cost for this, enterprise CALS, so there may be a place for low cost archiving solutions with Exchange 2010. But the implementation, maintenance, and support cost of even the most basic 3rd party solutions will probably cost more than ECALs for users. Larger companies or those that required additional archiving capabilities will still need 3rd party products.
August 15th, 2011 at 9:17 am
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March 10th, 2012 at 5:18 am
Thank you.