GroupWise Articles
Email Archivers Revisited
By Donna Moyer

Several years ago, email archiving was a hot topic as the new rules of discovery prompted everyone to look at how they would produce the appropriate email documents in the event of a lawsuit. Interest in archivers has resurfaced, but this time customers are looking at these devices as a solution to reducing out-of-control data stores.

The Challenge

Just as traditional data stores continue to grow, so do our email stores. It seems like an overnight explosion! But as anyone who has tried to implement an email store reduction policy knows, getting end-users to give up the items they have retained is almost impossible. Blame ENRON if you like, but people are more aware than ever that they may need to produce documentation to safeguard themselves. And in this day and age, who can blame them?

Enter the Email Archiver

More and more customers are contacting us to review the current email archiving solutions available for GroupWise. They want to use this technology as a way to reduce their data stores while giving end-users the comfort of knowing that they can retrieve a given message any time they need it. Here are a few important questions to ask as you consider the most popular GroupWise email archiving solutions on the market:

• How are you going to use the archiver? If you are simply going to use the archiver to be sure that all messages are archived per your data retention policies, any archiver compatible with GroupWise can achieve this goal – particularly if you don't anticipate your end-users going back to the archive on a regular basis to look for messages.
  
• Does the archiving solution maintain the folder structure of the end-user’s mailbox? Not all archivers will do this. However, if your end-users will be looking for old messages on a regular basis, they will want to see the familiar folder structure they use every day. A search function to find the messages is not enough.
  
• Does the archiver support stubbing? Stubbing is a really important feature if you are looking to convince your end-users that archiving is a good thing. Stubbing allows the message subject and the first few lines of an email to appear in the end-user’s live mailbox. The result? For the end-user, nothing seems to have disappeared from their mailbox, even though technically the emails have been archived!
  
• Are you going to be pulling mail from traditional GroupWise archives? Again, not all archivers support this functionality. If you are not only trying to reduce your live message store but also the data stores of archive files, you need to be sure that you pick an archiver that can seamlessly accommodate this function. If not, you will have to unarchive the messages back to the live message store, archive them to the archiver, and then reduce the message store.
  
• How much data are you planning to archive? Make sure that your archiver is not undersized and that you can easily add storage if necessary. Many archivers support NAS, SAN, or Windows file share targets. How much space you need is completely dependent on the retention policies of your organization. A rule of thumb? Plan for growth, and then work on getting buy-in from the powers that be to prune this data at some point after the archiver is in place.

Conclusion

Email archivers are a great way to reduce live message stores without getting end-users to commit to completely getting rid of data they want to retain. And remember, reducing message stores makes for faster and more seamless migrations to new hardware or operating system platforms. For customers looking to perform NetWare to Linux migrations, this is a great place to start when planning your GroupWise server migrations.

© Copyright 2010, Uptime NetManagement, Inc.

Article Source: http://www.uptimenmi.com/

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About the Author:
Donna Moyer is Principal/Senior Network Consultant of Uptime NetManagement, Inc. (http://www.uptimenmi.com/). Uptime is a Novell Gold Solutions partner providing technology solutions, customized training, and consulting services. If you are interested in finding out exactly what Novell can do for your business, or are seeking to maximize the benefits from your current Novell systems, call us today at 610-621-1244!