Archiving101.com

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:

• What scope of SharePoint content and metadata is captured? Some solutions capture only a portion of SharePoint content, e.g., specific documents or document collections. This kind of capture supports fine-grained recovery. Others capture not only document-type content, but also all the context data for the environment—the rich data that makes a SharePoint site interactive (lists, blog and wiki entries, front-end web server information, and more). All of this content and metadata is important for eDiscovery, compliance, and recovery; a holistic archiving solution must capture and store it all. When content and context are captured, it is possible to perform coarse-grained recovery to restore or migrate full SharePoint environments.

• How is the SharePoint content captured? Content can be captured from SharePoint continuously or periodically. Continuous capture of all content related to specific departments guarantees your needs for compliance and eDiscovery are covered.

• Does the solution provide more than just lower-cost storage? Archives provide great value in enabling the move of content from production systems to cheaper storage, but an archive that can also facilitate recovery provides even greater value. Having archiving and recovery in one solution means less complexity for IT to manage and greater operational efficiency and cost savings.

• How does the archiving solution enable end-users to access SharePoint content? When end users go to SharePoint to get their content, they don’t want to be redirected and they don’t want to search two repositories for data. Rather, the right solution will make access seamless, leaving content directly accessible through the SharePoint interface. It will also integrate seamlessly with the SharePoint search index, allowing archived content to appear in search results alongside active content. Be sure that your archiving solution enables seamless end-user access so that you don’t have to train users on new ways to access their information.

• How does the solution enable eDiscovery and retention management? Since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect in 2006, organizations have struggled to implement defensible litigation holds, especially on high-volume content sources like SharePoint. A good archiving solution will allow very granular controls over retention; that granular control stems from comprehensive capture capabilities and flexible retention rules. A unified content archive allows an organization to quickly implement item-level litigation holds and conduct eDiscovery through one simple interface.

• Is the solution part of an integrated content archiving platform? The most efficient archiving solution unifies email, file, and SharePoint archiving. Not only does this make tasks like setting litigation holds faster and easier, but it reduces storage costs by providing single-instance storage across all the content sources.

It seems that not much people have been willing to touch on this subject so far so maybe I’m going to be the first one here.  As you all probably know by now, Microsoft announced Exchange 2010 back in April 15th and one of the features in Exchange 2010 that got a lot of peoples attention is that it will have build in archiving, retention and eDiscovery. I am purposely not going to single out archive company names in this article.

Microsoft positions Exchange 2010 as a ‘personal archive’ and not as ‘business archive’ solution.  The distinction is there for many reasons.  First of all, Microsoft will with this solution only focus on allowing organizations to get rid of PST files, implement large mailboxes and provide advanced search.  It will not provide records management and preservation of electronic information beyond Exchange.  It is of my opinion then though that the larger enterprises who are going to look for a more complete solution that offers functionality beyond the basics which includes:

• Integration with software and applications to manage the eDiscovery process.  Search is not eDiscovery .. a proper eDiscovery application allows you to use advanced queries to create and narrow down search result sets, review and tag this data and more (i.e. case management)
• Allow for capturing content from more than just Exchange.  Many organizations are already capturing File System data, and are moving towards implementing SharePoint as well.  Capturing more content in a unified archive makes sense for not only storage reasons but also legal and compliance reasons.

Exchange falls short of the above, but it will probably gain traction in this space more or less with the smaller organizations that are going to look for a basic archiving solution.  These customers have been there all along and are happily served by some of the around 85 companies now in this space.  I personally think that Microsoft will start to take away business from the vendors that don’t offer anything beyond email, those that provide solutions that cover the basics.  After all .. why should a company spend money to buy the exact same ‘basic solution’ from a 3rd party when it is in the base product.

Now .. there are many things that Exchange 2010 doesn’t solve, so organizations that are looking at Exchange 2010 need to clearly understand what can be done with the application and what not.  If you are looking for case management in eDiscovery .. nope .. isn’t there .. if you are looking for a solution that can locate and ingest your PST files in your network beyond the file server .. nope .. can’t do that either.  Do your homework well and make a good decision, but make sure that if you are thinking about archiving beyond Exchange (File Systems and SharePoint) even if you might not do that now but next year  , you have to pick a vendor that can offer that and not pick one that will block you down the road

It looks like Cryoserver bit the dust again a little while ago .. its website hasn’t been updated in months.  Cryoserver went bankrupt about 2 years ago, but tried to make a fresh start.  What is not very known is that appliance software of Cryoserver is the same software that Trend Micro sells, but rebranded.

Competition is tough in the archiving market and you better have a good differentiating product to survive.

Remember this article that I wrote? It doesn’t seem that hackers need to try to get to your information when its in the all praised buzzword SaaS cloud. Techcrunch reports that even the almighty Google can mess up and had private documents shared without permissions.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/huge-google-privacy-blunder-shares-your-docs-without-permission/

There are a LOT of reasons why I don’t like Software As A Service (SaaS) for some mission critical applications. The biggest one is giving up control of your data! I don’t like having potentially sensitive client documents and work product in the hands of unknown parties. “Oh, but it’s Google, it’s safe!” Sure.

As the article above explains, even Google can sometimes mess up and compromise your documents. How about if it was a strategy memo for a client that ended up in the hands of opposing counsel? Potentially nasty? You betcha. Can you imagine the headlines when a hosted archive vendor was running both Merck and Pfizer and their information was freely shared amongst the users of the archives?

And do you know who has keys to your server room at your office? I’m sure you do - you can probably count those people on one hand; you may even eat lunch with them on a regular basis. Do you know who has the keys to Google’s server room? No. And you can say that about just about any online provider - you just don’t know who has access to those servers and that means you don’t know who has access to your documents.

That worries me. And if you handle confidential client work-product then it should worry you too.

So I’ve been on the road for a while now and was working on one of the conferences yesterday when a CIO of a large organization came by who wanted to know more about our product and how it stacked up to the competition a few booths down.

Out of courtesy I am withholding the name of the competition, but in this case they were giving away fancy pens.  After having spoken with said CIO for about 15-20 minutes he was interested in more information and wanted to put down some notes .. grabbed the pen from his pocket that he received earlier and the pen disintegrated … parts flying everywhere over the ground.  For the next 5 minutes he tried to assemble to pen again only to look at the logo a final time and tossing it with disgust in a trashcan.

What is interesting is that something simple like this could exlude the competitor from having any chance of moving further with this prospect.   Make sue the swag you give away at least is as reliable as your software …..

My RSS feeds gave me the following article http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=171581&WT.svl=news2_1 from Byte and Switch.

I suspect that the coming 12 months will give us further market consolidation .. there are about 70 vendors at the moment trying to grab a bit of marketshare with both Symantec and Mimosa Systems fighting for the #1 spot.

Today Google announced that it has added new option for archiving messages up to ten years for their Google’s Message Discovery solution, which is based on its 2007 acquisition of email archiving services vendor Postini. This new option is available for a flat fee of $45 USD per user per year, which raises the biggest question of all instantly. Isn’t Google pricing itself out of the market with this steep price?

Not only pricing, but a recent Forrester Research report also attributed relatively slow adoption of email archiving SaaS to network latency in accessing off-site archived messages and searching them for e-Discovery.

Google will continue to offer a one-year retention period for the existing fee of $25 per user per year. Both packages also include spam and virus filtering, policy management tools and, of course, search.

There are no announcements yet, but the rumors have been coming on for a while now.  Since this morning the Akonix website now proudly displays the Quest logo.  This would give Quest Software like Symantec the opportunity to provide email and IM archiving native from the same vendor.

However the market for email archiving is still much larger then that of IM archiving.  It only leaves Facetime independent.

From the comment that was posted on the ‘Microsoft is against stubbing‘ article it seems like that GFI is following the path of recommendation and not only fixes a huge hole in their product for capturing data that already is in the mailbox, but also does it without stubbing.

Now if only the rest of the industry starts to move away from stubbing then the world would be a better place.

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