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Active email archiving software (n.): products that capture and archive all enterprise email messages; provide archive access via Web and email clients; and integrate with records management tools, among other capabilities
Source: Gartner Inc.
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Considerations in Product Selection
If you're selecting a product, consider scalability. Will the product keep pace with the amount of email your organization produces? Can it adapt to your organization's evolving policies? You should be able to easily modify the who, what and how of email archiving. And of course, your organization may have specific technical requirements that supersede policy considerations. At Webcor Builders, Davis needed an archiving system that could search attachments as well as message content so nothing would fall through the cracks.
As Gable and others point out, however, the groundswell of interest in archiving technology belies the cultural maneuvers involved. "One of the biggest difficulties for CIOs is thinking of email archiving as a silver bullet," Gable says. "They buy a system and scratch another item off their to-do list without really thinking through why they are doing it. People think you can just buy a system and save everything for the same period of time." Such an approach sidesteps the biggest challenge: acclimating users with varying needs.
"The technology itself is fairly simple," says Gartner's Cain. "There are third-party add-ons to run in-house, or you can essentially outsource everything with a hosting service." Much more difficult are "the political and emotional issues dictating what gets saved and for how long."
So it behooves organizations to develop a retention policy first and then find the technology to enforce it. Unfortunately, that's seldom the way it works. "Most go about archiving backwards," Cain says. "They aggressively find the technology and then come up with a policy."
That's the progression that Mau followed, albeit grudgingly. "Before we got an archiving system, I went to management and told them I could go ahead and delete our users' personal folders, but then my tires would be slashed in the parking lot," he says. Without first centralizing archiving and thereby discontinuing the use of personal folders for that purpose, Mau suspected he couldn't effectively enforce a policy.
Once B&N wrests control of archiving from end users, a project that the company should complete this year, Mau will sit down with management and hammer out a policy. "We really have to think [about] how long users should keep email," says Mau. "We have some here who are strong legal proponents of deletion and others who are proud that they have every email they've ever sent."
Like Mau, CIO George Yacoub acquired archiving technology without an archiving policy, which he admits has made his job more challenging. He recently installed an EMC archiving system to manage storage at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, where many users' inboxes were reaching their limits. With the system, users are notified when their inboxes are approaching their limits, and they have the option of deleting messages or moving them to their local hard drives or offline media such as CDs.
Even without a policy, Yacoub says the archiving system is an important component of a longer-term storage management strategy. Eventually, he would like to devise a policy that restricts the use of email as a document management tool. He is currently testing a retention schedule that archives messages after 30 days, and ideally he would like to make a document management and imaging system available. "Instead of saving everything as an attachment, we need to educate users to use document imaging or archiving as management tools," he says.
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