54 Email Archiving Vendors
By Roger Matus, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President;
Sean True, Vice President of Research and Development;
and Chuck Ingold, Principal Research Engineer of InBoxer
Fifty-four companies sell email archiving and IM archiving products for Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. Every single product can copy a message and store it on a hard disk or tape. In addition, each one allows you to search and retrieve messages using a search engine. So, how do you decide? What features matter?
Fortunately, there are two independent sources that can be used to drive email archiving requirements: legal regulations and Microsoft’s technical documents on Microsoft Exchange. Looking at these, one can develop a list and come to conclusions about the importance of the following topics:
- Speed and accuracy of email and IM archive retrieval
- Why Microsoft says stubs “should be avoided”
- Microsoft Exchange 2010 and storage costs
- Using Exchange journaling versus MAPI or Exchange log files
- Litigation hold techniques matter
- Legal reasons for real-time monitoring
- On-premises versus the cloud.
This whitepaper covers the topics mentioned above and makes specific references to cases, legislation and documents from Microsoft.
Speed and Accuracy of Email and IM Archive Retrieval
The time it takes to find and retrieve a comprehensive set of messages can vary widely between archiving products. A search that takes minutes on one system could consume hours on
another. Long searches increase litigation support costs, which can run thousands of dollars per hour, and increase the risk of penalties for missing deadlines. These penalties can be severe.
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require a “copy of, or a description by category and location” of all electronically stored information with a deadline of just 99 days (Rule 16(b)).
The Freedom of Information Act requires a response within 20 days by federal law and as short as 24 hours in some jurisdictions.
To know whether a particular product will enable you to respond on time, ask your vendor three questions about each product:
- Which search engine is used to find messages?
- What optimization is done to speed search?
- Are the most common searches performed before you ask?
Search Engine: Significant progress has been made in search speed and performance in the past few years. Yet at least one of the largest and most well-known archiving vendors still uses the AltaVista search engine, which may not have been updated since 2002. (The most recent version of AltaVista Enterprise Search was released in 2002.) A product built in 2002 may have file size limits that made sense back then, but do not make sense with modern Microsoft Office documents and multimedia attachments. It can impact what is indexed and how it is retrieved.
In contrast, the open source Apache Lucene search engine is a respected, high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. The big advantage of Lucene is
the large army of developers who are constantly working on it to create state-of-the-art retrieval capabilities. As such, Apache Lucene is gaining use in leading edge archiving systems.
Optimization for Messaging: Searching emails and IMs can have one big advantage over web searching – the format of messages is standardized and well-known. Each message has exactly one header, which is structured into fields, such as FROM and SUBJECT. Each field has a name and a value with a precise syntax.