Archiving101.com

Still one of my favorite topics and seeing the discussions this triggers on the blog, also its high on other peoples lists.   While Googling for some information I ran across this prime piece of whitepaper. Quest’s Compliance Archiving with Microsoft Exchange Server.   Written by Michael Tweddle, who is the Technical Director for Intelligent Messaging Solutions at Quest Software this document initially looked interesting to read (I can recommend drinking this with a good whitepaper on a Saturday night).  

 Now .. it was all fine till I ran into the following:

“There are two key advantages of using journaling versus log shipping for e-mail compliance archiving: since log shipping is not designed for compliance, it does not capture any kind of recipient information in the To, CC, BCC fields, and distribution list expansion unless an organization manually retrieves this information. “

It looks like Mr Tweddle does not understand the way Transaction Logs work in Exchange … after all how else would you be able to reconstruct an Exchange Database using transaction logs from an older backup?   For this Mr Tweddle .. I have to unfortunately award you the famous Lost Envelope Award.

I ran into the following FAQ of Sunbelts Exchange Archiver (the rebranded ExchangePAM product) today :

http://www.sunbelt-software.com/Government-Education/Sunbelt-Exchange-Archiver/FAQ/#19

Q: What is ‘Direct Archiving’ what is new about it, and how does it work? 

A: Direct Archiving is when the message is immediately archived when it hits the Exchange server, bypassing the need of journaling, its more efficient. Direct Archiving is done with an Information Store event sink, not MAPI. 

It has to be noted though that the Exchange Store Event functionality has been deemphasized  in Exchange 2007 and in Microsoft terms this means that it will be cut from the product.  The logical replacement for Store Events are actually webservices, however the performance of the Exchange Webservices is actually below of that what MAPI gives you.

At first this really seems interesting and fascinating .. I mean .. most who have worked with MAPI know its limitations … to get a decent throughput of the data you will need large amounts of threads and opting to pursue other ways are definately refreshing.

Of all places you would expect a proper archiving system to function properly, the Whitehouse, apperantly more then 5 million messages were apperantly not captured and are lost forever due to a faulty defect system.  An at the moment ‘unidentified’ contractor was responsible for auditing the system and failed to detect that it was not functioning properly.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/08/bush-e-mail-mys.html

 The worst thing that can happen to an archiving system is data loss and this seems to be the biggest case of this yet.  Makes you also wonder .. which vendor’s product failed at such a high profile customer?