Exchange email archival?

Enterprise Vault - makes panda very sad.
We spent a fortune on it, rolled it out.
It never worked properly, IMAP certainly never worked correctly.
We ended up removing it - big financial loss for us.
 
You could use ExMerge to copy data to a seperate .pst then give the user a copy to run on their PC/Laptop and keep a backup elsewhere.

BTW, I believe exchange 2010 has an archive solution built in.
 
If you only have 15 users you could use psts on a network storage area and back that up to tape or use some other means of backup. raid etc. But that means that users will have to manually move there emails to the psts and a lot of places are against psts even when they are on network storage and backed up.

The place i am at use mimecast with archiving, not sure on the price though, maybe they can give you some ocuk discount :D
 
PSTs are the devil, they tick absolutely none of the boxes that you want from an archiving solution and cause huge management nightmares.

I looked at mimecast, but nobody came back to me with pricing...ho hum, they obviously didnt want my business so I went elsewhere :)
 
groen said:
I would recommend buying more hard drive space for the exchange server and not archiving at all.
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Me too.

Or if they need it for compliance, go hosted like Mimecast et al where it's fully audited/non-deletable/10 year archive/bells/whistles.
 
Definitely avoid PST files like the plague, also wouldn't suggest just adding more storage and being merry as it will only cause more hassle in the long run!

I have been looking at several on-site solutions myself and it all depends on your budget and what features you want, assuming a small budget I would suggest looking at;

GFI MailArchiver - Cheap and cheerful archiving. Users can access archived emails via a web interface or via an Outlook plug-in. It doesn't support stubbing but then if all you are doing is archiving and do not have any email age/size limits then you probably won't need it. You have the option of using GFI's proprietary DB or local install/separate SQL server (£££).. Licensing is per active mailbox so should work out pretty cheap once you have the hardware for it to go onto.


Barracuda 150 - Can be bought as a 1U boxed product (Hardware & software) and has extra features over GFI such as;

A method of importing your current Exchange mail store
The option of using it a a relay and adding in spam filtering etc
Message stubbing
Hardware included and software pretty much ready roll out

Only downsides compared to GFI is that it doesn't have an outlook plug-in and the "box" is licensed for up to 150 users whether you need that many or not, so probably more expensive.

If you want more features and have a much bigger budget then I would have a look at C2C ArchiveOne and Mimosa Nearpoint and maybe Symantec Enterprise Vault but I havn't seen this in action myself.

Hope that's of some use to you!
 
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^ Doesn't sound good! What volume of email was this with?

Also, a question about hosted archiving. How does it work with internal mail? I know that with spam/virus filtering they simply pickup your email (MX record pointed to MessageLabs etc.) and then have your servers MX record to send it to once they are done but this doesn't affect internal email.
 
Messagelabs put a small server on site which caches, encrypts and compresses before sending to the archive, I'm assuming others do the same thing

Got a barracuda unit on eval the other day - so far so good. Does what it says on the tin really! Also came with a t-shirt that says "Email retentive" on the back :D
 
Sorry for being slow responding this week- I've been at infosec :)

@iaind Sorry no one got back to you :( Who was it so I can shoot them??? ;)

Mimecast uses a exchange plugin for Archive, Continuity and Compliance- so no need for any extra hardware to manage.

I'll ask the boss if we can do a OCUK discount :)

Justin
 
Mimecast still dont offer the functionality of Messagelabs/message one Solution. Plus the Mimecast guy i spoke to at infosec had breath that smelt like he has been chewing turds :P

We spent a fortune on Zantaz EAS and it is a real bag of hammers. Spent a long time looking at a hosted solution as it simply means i dont have to store and backup 2tb of data someone else can do it.

Exchange 2010 looks to have archiving built in which im glad they have finally done. And with SP1 it looks like the archive can sit elsewhere not on the same datastore as the original mailbox.
 
CraigN said:
Exchange 2010 looks to have archiving built in which im glad they have finally done. And with SP1 it looks like the archive can sit elsewhere not on the same datastore as the original mailbox.
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I haven't had a proper go with it, but a quick tinker revealed it's basically just a secondary storage group which users are automatically linked to.

Assuming you have enterprise 2k3, you can just make a secondary storage group and do exactly this anyway.

It's not a proper archiving function unfortunately, and I've been through a lot of programs trying to find one which does everything.
I'll give that PAM4Exchange one a go since quite a lot of our clients are asking more and more about email archiving.
 
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