Archiving101.com

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.

With KISS I of course refer to the fact that you should “Keep It Simple Stupid”.  In my years in this industry I’ve learned many new things and in fact .. I enjoy learning new stuff on a daily basis.  It keeps me alert and on the edge.  I also have learned from mistakes that people made .. sometimes it happened because no one knew better (sometimes it was ignorance).   One should learn from mistakes to ensure that they won’t happen again.

One of those mistakes I have seen was an unnamed company that did implement email archiving and decided that it was easier for them to create an email retention policy on a per user basis as it allowed them to be very granular on what specific information is retained and disposed off.  At first this doesn’t sound that bad … but if you realize that there were a few thousand employees in this company the eyebrows should rise in anticipation.   It is generally recommended that archiving policies are regularly reviewed to ensure that they are current and reflect whatever the business needs to do (I’m not acting like a lawyer here, but that really isn’t a bad thing to do).   Back to this company .. with several thousand policies now in place and with a 3 month review of retention policies it ended up being 2 peoples jobs simply reviewing each employees retention policy in the archiving system.

Personally .. I can think of a much more challenging and fun job to do.  My recommendation .. keep it simple with the policies .. don’t go overboard. Create as many as you need, but as few as you can work with.  It’ll pay off in the long run.

This question has come up to me many times in the past 2 years and actually there is a lot to think about.  While support for Exchange 5.5 has ended quite some time ago, there are still lots of companies relying on Exchange 5.5 on a daily basis.  After all .. fundementally there wasn’t anything wrong with Exchange 5.5 if you simply used it as a mail and calendar server.

If a software vendor decides to support another platform, it actually adds significant amount of QC time for each release. In some cases this could easily add 10-20% extra time to the QC timeframe adding weeks if not months until a release is available.  And this all for <5% of the market and generally for a market that didn’t decide to spend money on software and hardware even when the product actually got EOLed.  It is my opinion though that the valuable QC and development time could be invested in other features then Exchange 5.5.

For those that don’t know .. Exchange 5.5 actually never had Journaling as a base feature.  It got added at a much later stage in its life and one had to go to ‘raw mode’ to hack in the functionality.

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.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/20/AR2008082002617.html?hpid=moreheadlines

WASHINGTON — The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003 and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page outline of the White House’s e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors’ proposals, which was dated June 20.

Last week, the White House declined to comment on the document.

On Wednesday, the White House refused to talk about internal White House contracting procedures, but said the information is “outdated and seriously inaccurate.” It would not elaborate. The White House also declined to say whether it has hired a contractor for the work yet.

“With an eye on the clock, the White House continues to drag its feet and do everything possible to postpone public access to the records of this presidency,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a private watchdog group.

The draft document outlines a process in which private contractors would attempt to retrieve lost e-mail from 35,000 disaster recovery backup tapes dating back to October 2003, a period covering such events as growing violence in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the criminal probe into the disclosure that Valerie Plame had worked for the CIA.

The recovery project would not use backup tapes going back to March 2003, according to the draft document, even though an earlier White House assessment suggested e-mails were missing from that period as well.

Industry experts point out that relying on the backup system to ensure accurate retention, preservation and retrieval of all e-mails is problematic because it does not take into account deleted e-mails.

“A backup system isn’t designed to be a 100 percent complete inventory of all e-mails,” says William P. Lyons, chairman and chief executive of AXS-One, a provider of records compliance management solutions.

“It’s designed to make a copy of data at a specific point-in-time,” said Lyons. “Data is backed up on a daily, weekly and monthly basis as part of a disaster recovery strategy, to ensure to protect the organization from data loss.”

The White House draft document says that the number of days of missing e-mail ranges from 25 to 225, a range that industry experts say would make it difficult to bid on a recovery project.

“Generally, when the scope of the work is expected to fluctuate by a factor of nearly ten, I can only take you so seriously,” said Steve Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement program at George Washington University.

“Contractors cannot accurately plan for or staff based on such an estimate,” said Schooner.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in February, the White House told Congress it was trying to determine how many e-mails were missing. An earlier analysis from 2005 estimated the number of days of missing e-mails at 473 over a period of 20 months.

While the higher number would appear to suggest the White House has found a large amount of previously missing e-mail, that may not necessarily be the case. Industry experts say it is unclear from the brief description in the draft document whether the missing-day measurements in that document and those in the earlier analysis can be compared.

“We will continue to work with members of Congress and the National Archives and will communicate the results of our accounting effort at an appropriate time,” White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has said the White House’s failure to properly archive e-mails violated the Presidential Records Act. The top lawyer for the National Archives has expressed disappointment the White House did not have a formal records management system in place.

On Wednesday, House Democratic Caucus chairman Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois criticized how the problem has been handled, saying, “The White House that wants to keep track of all your e-mail and phone records can’t even keep track of their own.”

Kinda taking this off topic in a sense, but interesting to read non the less.  This is from the highly valuable Active Directory discussion list where Don Hacherl, who was the Lead Development Manager at Microsoft for AD, posted this story:

 The oldest traceable part of AD started life at 3Com in 1988 or 1989.  This was an (incomplete!) X.500-ish directory with custom communication protocols, built on top of a C-Tree database, running under 16-bit OS/2.  By 1990 3Com had abandoned its network software efforts and the directory code moved to Microsoft as part of some complicated deal.  The LanMan group planned to include the directory service in LanMan 3.0 and immediately started porting it to the JET Blue ISAM and building an RPC front end compliant with the X/Open XDS API.

IT history has more interesting stories .. I bet not many know the background of “Squeaky Lobster” in Exchange Server.

I’ve seen a few companies use this phrase now and the more I think about it, the more it really makes sense to explain the value of an archiving system to a business this way.  Instead of showing off with all the laws and regulations that my unfortunate brain has had to consume, relating it to something that everyone understands is refreshing.

Why an insurance policy?  Well .. in a sense it kinda works the same.  An archiving solution simply will save you money in case of an eDiscovery request. Its like driving a car without car insurance.