Centralized email archiving is a process that safely archives your email off site, while providing rapid, on-demand access to that email even after it has been archived. Do you need this?

The answer is probably "No". But, let's talk about why...

You need to start with what you are required to save, and what you want to save. If you have governmental (HIPPA requirements, for example) or other legal requirements to save email for an extended period of time, then you may need to have an email archive solution.

You may want to save emails going back over several years even though you are not required to do so. You want to be able to go back and find that email with a price or a critical attachment that doesn't appear to have been saved anywhere else. The fear of missing some important piece of information or not being able to find something historically could have critical business ramifications.

Whether due to legal requirements or personal preference, as your total email size grows, your email server may run low on disk space for storage or may slow down as the volume of total email keeps growing. That is the point at which I'm typically asked about email archive solutions.

What to do with all that old email?

Older versions of Microsoft Exchange, running on older servers, tend to run out of space. Additionally, older versions of Microsoft Small Business Server had artificial Exchange database limitations that made it a necessity to run Outlook archiving to move mail out to archive files (PST files).

The problem with PST files is that they are cumbersome to administer, and if they get too big, they become unusable. Too often, the person setting up their own Outlook archiving saves the archive file on their local machine, which is not backed up and may not be transferred when a new PC arrives.

Best practices for most users:

The biggest use of storage and resources is email attachments. If your users save email attachments into your standard folder structure, or even better, save into a document management system like Microsoft SharePoint, the file storage for Exchange goes down dramatically.

Many companies utilize a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to track all customer interactions, including email. If customer emails are in the CRM system, they don't need to be separately saved in Exchange as well.

Get users to do a little email housekeeping on occasion. Deleted emails are kept until you delete them from the deleted email folder. That folder can be set to automatically be cleared, or the user can periodically remove old deleted items manually. I've seen users with tens of thousands of deleted items clogging up their email.

Remove spam, especially. Many spam filters simply move "junk" email to a different folder that is rarely cleared out.

Email archive software

If you require an email archive solution, all solutions store archived email in a central location, either on premises or remotely (in the cloud) and is easily accessible in one of two ways:

• Through a folder in each user's Outlook email client
  
• By using a web browser
  

Of course, regular email is also stored in a central location, on the Exchange server. The difference is that archived email is stored in a way that does not affect your main email performance but still makes it available on demand.

There are many different companies that offer email archiving services - GFI MailArchiver, MessageLabs, and SunBelt Exchange Archiver to name a few. While each offers something slightly different, here are the main things to look for when considering email archiving:

• Easy to install with little ongoing administrative effort
  
• Automated processing of emails to be archived
  
• A system that can grow with your increasing email archiving needs
  
• Affordability
  
• Transparency and ease of use for the end-user
  
• Public Folder Archiving
  
• Support for end-user searches within Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Web Access
  
• Archive existing mail stores (PSTs) with tools designed to import mail from either PST files or live Exchange environments.
  
• Security/Encryption
  
• Access to Archive during Exchange downtime
  

Here are the key benefits you and your organization should expect:

• An 80% smaller message store means enormous benefits: better performance, faster backups / easier restore, and archiving
  
• Prevents having to buy bigger servers for increased mail.
  
• Give your users self-service to recover their own 'lost email' and an 'unlimited' mailbox size, (eliminating pesky quotas), while you control message storage growth.
  
• You can find, import and eradicate all existing PST files

What is the investment?

The investment in on-premise email archiving is the software to perform the automated archive and retrieval, which may include the purchase of Microsoft SQL server database, and then utilizing existing disk storage or purchasing additional storage. Email archive software starts in the range of $2,500, plus annual software maintenance of about 25% (and may also need database software).

For cloud-based archiving, the software and storage is all handled by the cloud provider for a monthly fee that is based on the number of users and the amount of storage utilized. The monthly fee is around $4-8 per user per month depending on options (length of retention, archive size, etc).

For most users, the better investment would be to upgrade their Exchange server with more memory and storage, and train their users to utilize document management for email attachments.

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