Archiving101.com

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)