KEY POINTS:
A customer is blaming you for the lateness of a project, but four months ago you had an email from them confirming the deadline and you know there's still a week to go. So exactly where is that email?
The point of email archiving systems, which go beyond basic data storage, is that you can use them to access historical emails and produce them quickly when you need to. The ultimate goal is one secure, searchable email archive, whether it is held within the business or with an online storage and archiving host.
Email archiving is important for both business and personal situations and can be legally critical.
For example, if an employee is accused of sending competitors business sensitive information or customer's abuse by email, the employer may need to produce the offending emails as evidence before being able to terminate employment. Similarly, business critical information and records may be held in emails, meaning email is an official corporate record and company asset.
These reasons and others are why many deadline-focused, legal and financial services businesses do not delete historical email; instead, it is either printed and archived in a hard copy filing system or archived electronically and backed up online.
For businesses with large volumes of email filing emails as hard copy is time consuming, expensive and risky as the copies can be stolen or damaged. Additionally, how do you train staff which emails are important enough to print? Comparatively, email archiving software is automated, reduces the amount of total data storage needed by the business, results in increased IT productivity and reduces backup and restore times.
Proving the value of email archiving solutions - and the demand - in January New Zealand-developed email archiving, retrieval and analysis brand Aftermail was sold to US software company Quest Software for $14.7 million plus performance-based consideration of up to $30 million in cash over three years. Security software brand Symantec also attributed a recent positive revenue announcement to demand for email archiving and storage solutions.
So where can you start? Strategy is all-important when planning an email archiving solution.
Best practice email archiving steps include classifying existing IT architecture, email infrastructure and messaging systems in the business and knowing the number of mailboxes you have and the number of emails and attachments sent and received per day and their average file size and types.
From there, businesses can decide on whether a hosted or in-house email archiving solution will make more sense, how it will be used, and the best way to train staff and ensure they follow archiving and search procedures correctly. A software consultant will often be needed to help larger businesses make these decisions and to conduct initial email metrics.
Email archiving systems themselves are reasonably straightforward, consisting of specialised software that automatically captures copies of all inbound, outbound and internal email sent through an email server (or servers) and stores them in one central email archival and analysis system.
Authorised users can then query the archive and conduct searches to retrieve one or more messages, often using a standard web browser and without the need for help from an IT specialist. Emails are typically found within minutes and many products include a reporting function so the business can see at a glance what kind of email is being sent and received and at what volume. Deleted emails can also be restored back to an original mailbox.
For small or home-based businesses, it is possible to adopt a DIY approach to email archiving. Using an email client such as Outlook, create topical folders and make a habit of transferring messages to these as they come in: aim for an almost empty inbox. You can then conduct email searches by keyword from relevant folders.
Businesses that master email archiving will be soon able to find those elusive emails and prove that, occasionally, the customer is not always right.
NEED TO KNOW
* Email archiving solutions are available for email platforms such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, Sendmail and other SMTP-based email systems
* Email archiving tools are often embedded in wider data and storage management or security products and services from business software brands
* Email archiving systems can reduce email data storage requirements by up to 80 per cent through compression and management
* Correct email archiving help meet Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC and other international regulatory compliance measures
* Moving email from an email server to an archive reduces messaging server size, which improves performance and reduces backup times
