Archiving101.com

I’ve started to receive quite a few comments in the last few days from people who purchased their archiving product but are finding that support is not responding adequately to their problems.     Not sure what is going on here .. and I would be interested to hear from you if you have heard this from other sources as well.

So lately I’ve been reading quite a bit on the usability of products. With this I’m not really referring to what the administrator sees when he opens up his console on Monday morning sipping a cup of coffee, but the stuff that the end users see and work with.

The success of an archiving solution partially (I’m not saying entirely here on purpose)  depends on if users can comfortably use the application to their benefit.  Important to understand is that a solution or feature that is too complicated to understand or use is simply going to be ignored by the end users.  A properly designed solution ensures that users optimally leverage the functionality given to them, resulting actually in a benefit for the employer (that could be increased productivity for instance).

Now .. if I talk to Product Managers from competing vendors they all agree that usability is important and they tout that theirs has the ‘best of class’ or ‘best in the industry’ … or whatever this weeks hot description is.  If that is the case .. why does my head hurt sometimes when I see screenshots of the user interface?  If it hurts me .. it probably hurts many other brains as well.

A solution should not only be technical capable .. but also usable.  There are tons of reports out there that probably give you some rough number or idea on ‘extra savings’ a proper designed user interface will give you so I’m not going to quote those (Google them if you wish).  In the last Gartner Magic Quadrant … ‘ease of use’ was seen as a big bonus point … and I’m glad that that is starting to be recognized.  The fact that archiving solutions solve a very complex problem doesn’t automatically mean that these solutions have to look complex or be complex to use.

Remember .. your end users will love you

Historically consolidating your archiving systems or moving to a new archiving product has been challenging in many occasion.  The fact that customers choose another archiving product isn’t always because something else is better (it is a large percentage however).  Companies get acquired and there might be another product in use already that will be made standard.  Or … customers opt to move away from an on premise solution to a hosted archive.  In my years in this industry I’ve seen it all … most often these migrations were painful, time consuming and costly.  The easiest way was to export all the data to PST (if that option was even available), and then import it back into the new system.

However you now can buy an off-the-shelf product that can help you migrate your archived data to a new system.  The folks at Essential in the UK have written it.  Right now it supports only a few archiving vendors, but I suspect more will follow. More details are at http://www.essential.co.uk/product/transvault/index.asp

Looks like people are finally listening and seeing that stubbing/shortcutting truly is ‘evil’ and that it has negative impact on an Exchange environment.  Quoting from:

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc671168(EXCHG.80).aspx

Third-party archiving solutions have become popular as corporate compliance requirements and mailbox quota management have gained importance. Many of these archiving solutions offer the ability to leave a small stub file in place of the archived message that can be used by end users to retrieve archived messages from the archival system. Some organizations use the stub file solution as a workaround to offering large mailboxes. One of the goals of stub archiving solutions is to reduce the aggregate mailbox and database size, thereby reducing recovery time objectives (RTOs). On the surface, this appears to be a good idea. However, stub-based archiving solutions have the following technical problems:

• Server performance   Removing the message bodies and attachments from Exchange reduces the mailbox size, but it does not significantly change the server performance for users accessing Exchange via Outlook in online mode and Outlook Web Access. Item counts are the primary performance driver for the Exchange store, and not aggregate size. For example, server performance with a folder containing 100 KB of full e-mail message items is similar to a folder containing 100 KB of stub files.
• Client complexity   Because the use of stub files with a third-party archiving solution requires the deployment and use of Outlook add-ins, a significant amount of time must be spent by administrators to deploy and manage these add-ins. Administrator time is also required to assist end users with technical difficulties using the add-ins. Not deploying stub files removes all of this additional administrative work that must be performed, thereby allowing more time to administrators and end users.

Today I raise a glass and toast ….  for the non-believers .. time to change opinion.  Archiving vendors need to change their ways to capture information.

This week I’ll be spending some time at LegalTech. My employer has a booth at this conference and during todays setup I kinda walked around and chatted a bit with the competition in the space (even though one might be a competitor, you should still be able to have a nice talk as two grown adults right?).    With only a few archiving vendors actually having booths, the focus at the conference goes beyond just archiving and it will be nice to hopefully see some new and interesting technology. Expect to see a few press releases this week (like Mimosa Systems announcing their new SDK availability for NearPoint)

In other news .. not all US States apparently have the same records rentention laws. In Hawaii, government records that must be made available under open records law include agency meeting minutes and documents such as government contracts and purchasing information. The law requires government agencies to make their records available to ensure an honest and open government.

However, the law does not require state agencies to maintain e-mails and other documents, even those that rise to the standard of a record. So, while people have a right to inspect public records, including e-mails, the law doesn’t provide any guarantee that they will exist.  More at: http://www.kpua.net/news.php?id=15198 

No surprise that another archiving vendor gets bought since there are so many in this space.  This weeks subject is Fortiva that got picked up by Proofpoint.  Fortiva is a SaaS hybrid solution that has an on premise appliance and combines that with running archiving in the cloud.

I’ve always been interested in the DLP products as they are very complimentary to archiving solutions.  Looks like Proofpoint does have some work to do though to get the two products integrated.

Some more information can be found at this link:

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/another_email_a.html

Again a good reason to have email archives around.  Lets just hope that people finally one day will understand that you should not put anything in an email that you wouldn’t say out loud.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/business/20bear.html?em&ex=1214107200&en=54a2b5cea096b47b&ei=5087%0A

I know I’m a little bit late with blogging about this, but my travels to TechEd last week where I had booth duty and some good conversations with our competitors prohibited me from having some writing time.  FTI (for those unaware of who they are) is known, amongst many things for their Ringtail software.  They have announced last week to acquire Attenex  for an easy 88 million .. adding to the consolidation that is going on in this industry.

I have been reading some interesting posts on this .. where as Aaref Hilaly was pretty clear on his opinion: http://www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/2008/06/11/fti-consulting-acquires-attenex-for-88-million/

It is my opinion though that the archiving industry can’t sustain the amount of vendors that are in the space and that are still entering.  Roughly 60 or so are now active selling a slew of on premise, SaaS and CDP solutions.  Either the consolidation is going to continue or some might have to face a hard fact.

Microsoft recently updated the MSDN article that talks about the maximum items you should have in your mailbox so that optimal performance remains.   I’ve said it many times before, but I’m against stubbing/shortcutting/extending or whatever kinda name the archiving vendor may give to the technology as it increases the risk for the performance problems.

After all … it isn’t the size of the Exchange Database that dictates how well it performs .. its the amount of items.

So I would say that this is recommended reading  fo all of you

http://tinyurl.com/5o6vku

 (shortened it since it is a crazy long MSFT link)