There is still a lot of opportunity in email archiving – around 45% of SMBs still do not have an email archiving solution. There are tens of millions of Exchange seats out there, and because these organizations do not have email archiving software in place, they are facing key IT challenges every day. The process of archiving electronic information is the essence of what an email archiving solution does. However, email archiving software goes beyond that; the technology helps solve key challenges IT staff face, primarily, lower email management costs and reducing legal risks.

Email archiving helps lower email management costs in a number of ways. By offloading Exchange an email archiving solution reduces the load on Exchange, making it less sluggish and, because there is less email stored, backup and restore times are reduced. PST files spread throughout the organization on desktops and laptops are an IT headache. An email archiving solution allows the organization to get rid of PST-related management and backup overhead, while giving users virtually unlimited mailboxes.

Organizations also face compliance issues and e-discovery regulations: sources of legal risk that archiving software mitigates. With advanced search, legal hold and retention policy support, an email archiving solution is a key component of any compliant organization. Also, with more and more countries passing data protection acts, procedures on the timely production of evidence and other regulations, organizations are compelled to respond.

With the latest GFI MailArchiver 2011 R3 release, GFI has innovated in the archiving space to deliver actionable information to organizations of any size. By not letting digital archives gather ‘dust’, GFI MailArchiver does more than traditional archiving software and directly appeals to business owners and other stake holders in the organization. The MailInsights module in the latest R3 release helps organizations, for example, see who is abusing web-based email, helps them gain visibility into how email storage is being used, and allows them to determine email responsiveness. By leveraging the rich data in email, email archiving is ever more relevant to the organization. We’re no longer simply talking about archiving but also gathering business and behavioral intelligence.

Resellers have good reason to be excited; large numbers of SMBs still rely on PST files, legal regulations that mandate archiving software are on the increase, and innovation in the marketplace makes archiving even more appealing and salient to SMBs – A perfect opportunity to target new business and have the edge on the competition.

Have a look at what GFI MailArchiver can do to improve your email archiving system, or just download a free trial and give it a spin!

Imagine an email archiving solution that not only helps you keep a record of all emails sent and received but also allows you to leverage the information in email to deliver insights into how the organization behaves and communicates. Just think how business risk could be reduced and email productivity better managed thanks to the information email provides you with. That would be great, wouldn’t it? Well you can because GFI MailArchiver now ships with MailInsights, the first data mining tools in an email archiving solution.

MailInsights enables admins to mine the data in emails sent and received by users. It gives you the same level of visibility into how the company email infrastructure is being used as you have when using Internet monitoring software – without violating users’ privacy or requiring admins to read through other users’ email. The robust reporting goes well beyond simple archiving and searching. Using GFI MailArchiver’s MailInsights tool, your email can provide you with insight into 16 areas, divided into seven categories:

Communications Flow

1. Who are users spending the most time emailing?
Are your users emailing customers, vendors, different offices, or people the next row over? We spend a lot of time on email, now you can determine just what we’re doing with it over time.

2. Who were the most important contacts for the last person who did that job?
When you’re new to a role, the first few weeks can be quite unproductive. Users can spend weeks just trying to get a feel for the job, understanding who their peers are, who the go-to people are, and so on. Being able to provide them a report, detailing who their predecessor emailed most often for example, can help them get up to speed quickly.

3. Which customers need a little more attention?
Customer satisfaction can be strongly influenced by communications with sales and/or support. Customers who send/receive a higher volume of email might be those that need a manager’s involvement.

4. Which customers would make good referrals?
The customers that your sales and support teams communicate with frequently can be some of your best referrals. Knowing who those are makes asking for references easy.

5. Who’s talking to whom?
Reorganizations, mergers, divestitures and acquisitions can all be disruptive. Knowing where the communication channels exist helps to determine what is working and what isn’t.

Personal Usage

6. How much email is sent to or received from personal services?
The popular mail services like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc., are frequently the choice for personal email, not business services. Seeing how much mail goes to these services can help you determine whether email is being used only sparingly for personal use, or if someone is spending too much time on communications that are not business related.

Responsiveness

7. How long does it take users to respond to customer emails?
Customers hate waiting. When a customer sends an email, how long does he/she have to wait before getting a response? Knowing the answer to that question helps you make sure you are meeting SLAs, and can identify whether a customer satisfaction issue may be developing.

8. Is the helpdesk responding to user emails in a timely fashion?
One reason everyone calls the help desk is because they don’t want to wait for a response to an email. Using MailInsights you can now see just how long a user has to wait before getting a response which can help with internal SLAs, metrics and staffing decisions.

Storage

9. How much storage space is taken up by attachments?
Email is often the de facto file transfer system, both internally and with external parties. Email storage is a scarce resource, so knowing where all that disk space is going can help you justify expenditures, or develop policies to conserve that limited space.

10. Who are the mail hoarders?
MailInsights makes it easy to determine who hoards email and has the largest email load..

11. Are all those attachments business related?
Docx, pdf, and pptx files are exchanged daily between businesses and with customers. Audio files, like mp3, typically are not on the list of files you’d expect to be sent and received on a daily basis. With MailInsights you see how much premium space is being consumed by files that don’t have a business purpose or should be transferred in another manner not via email.

12. What’s a good attachment size limit?
This is a question many organizations will struggle with because they don’t have good metrics that show what users need or what users consume in terms of file size. MailInsights can tell you exactly what’s going on with attachment sizes – from the smallest to the largest file.

Stale accounts

13. Are inactive accounts still receiving email?
Inactive email accounts are often not deleted when an employee leaves the company and that inbox continues to receive emails. Important information or sales leads could be ‘lost’ unless someone is checking the account regularly. Being able to check whether inactive accounts are still getting email could help identify important opportunities or pending customer requests.

Policy violations

14. Are users maintaining a professional demeanor when using email?
Every email your users send is statement from your company. Checking emails for appropriate language helps maintain the company’s reputation.

15. Are users BCC-ing emails to personal accounts?
Most companies have policies prohibiting the blanket forwarding of company email to personal accounts. Most don’t have a way to detect when this policy is violated. MailInsights can report on BCC activities and identify users who want to keep their own email archive beyond the company’s reach and control.

Intellectual Property

16. Is anyone emailing the competition?
Emailing the competition may be harmless, or it could be the sign of an imminent defection, with corporate data as a kind of dowry. If you know that users are emailing the competition then you can start to investigate the issues before it becomes a more serious problem or data is lost or passed on to third parties..

Knowledge is powerful, and knowing what is going on within your email system helps ensure that your technology investment is being used wisely. GFI MailArchiver’s MailInsights is the tool email admins need to understand just how the system is being used.

Learn more about MailInsights and view sample reports and screenshots.

Have a look at what GFI MailArchiver can do to improve your email archiving system, or just download a free trial and give it a spin!

The first step when it comes to maintaining Exchange performance consists of the basic, but crucial, admin tasks. Microsoft routinely issues patches for Windows Server that correct bugs and security holes. It is good security practice to keep Windows up-to-date against the latest threats. A related point is that of checking for updated drivers that may have performance enhancements. Windows Update makes it easy to check for the latest updates and install them. Apart from Windows Server updates themselves, there are Exchange updates and service packs issued from time to time. Windows Update does not check for Exchange updates so it’s good practice to check regularly, or to sign up to Exchange-related blogs or news sites. Other basic admin tasks include putting in monitoring disk space and the Exchange performance counters as they can help identify if the hardware is adequate or not to provide the required Exchange performance.

The above measures go some way towards ensuring adequate Exchange performance, however admins can go a step further in ensuring both Exchange performance in terms of speed and availability. It is stating the obvious, but the fewer emails stored in Exchange, the lower the load on the server, and hence faster performance. Admins cannot set mailbox quotas to a few kilobytes otherwise they won’t be long in a job! However admins do set mailbox quotas to reasonable limits, not just for performance reasons but also due to storage constraints. As users don’t like to delete emails, they tend to resort to PST files to archive their old email – not an ideal situation as PST files create additional problems. With an email archiving solution, the email is stored in a more efficient, compressed manner. By keeping this central repository of email with mailbox quotas, Exchange will have a reduced email load to process.

Another advantage of having a central repository is that if Exchange were ever to go down, users can still access their emails from the archive should they need to refer to them. With mailboxes being increasingly used as a document store, the large and numerous attachments put pressure on Exchange performance, as well as making any email downtime even more upsetting for the organization. An archiving solution not only ensures continued access to such documents, it can also provide fast, full text indexing of both the emails as well as the attachments.

Exchange on-premise will continue to underpin the communications infrastructure for years to come, and ensuring its performance is critical to any organization. Admins now have tools that provide more than basic admin tasks and which help them boost exchange performance and minimize downtime.

When talking about Exchange email backup, it’s natural to assume that a backup application would solve the problem. You want backup right? So a backup application seems like the obvious answer. However, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and this applies to email backup. Exchange email backup applications tend to take two routes: either backing up the information store, or else doing a more granular brick-level backup. The key point to note about these two types of methods is that they implicitly approach Exchange backup as if backing up a file – just one that happens to contain email. This approach is fine when you’re looking for a disaster recovery solution or if your Exchange, or a significant part of it,gets corrupted and you want to restore Exchange from scratch. One obvious downside with these approaches is that you may not have all the latest email backed up – new email may have been stored in Exchange after the backup was taken.

Another approach to Exchange email backup is to look at the problem from a different angle. The key value of backing up is not exchange per se but the email inside it. Ideally you want to always have the latest emails backed up automatically and immediately to avoid any lost data. Using an email archiving solution as an alternative to email backup gives you a number of advantages right out of the box. With an email archiving solution based on journaling technology you know that email will be backed up. Archiving solutions are designed and deployed differently to email backup applications. Good email archiving solutions come with native Outlook integration as well as a web interface allowing users to access their own email. This is invaluable in that it allows users to restore their own email – without having to call up the IT helpdesk! With Outlook integration, users can simply drag and drop the emails they would like to restore back into their Outlook folders.

Another aspect of email backup is PST files. Users resort to PST files when they reach their mailbox quotas and are uncomfortable with deleting email. PST files tend to grow rapidly and are an IT admin’s nightmare when it comes to backing them up; PST files are spread across the network! For an effective and efficient Exchange email backup, PST files should be removed from the network. There are much better ways to extend mailbox storage without loading Exchange: an email archiving solution would be excellent for this.

Exchange email backup remains a challenge but can save an organisation costs and make the task of email management a more efficient one that can meet the needs of backing up email, removing PST files and also meeting compliance and legal standards.

One of the key features email storage software should offer is the centralization of emails and attachments. The storage software interfaces with your mail server to automatically capture email and file it in a central email archiving system. This should be done in an efficient manner to minimize storage costs. The captured emails and their attachments are indexed so that the organization can conduct full text searches across the archive and the contents of attachments. A good solution would be able to index as many attachment formats as possible, as well as zip files and their contents, to ensure accuracy in the search results.

With emails stored in a central location it becomes possible to ensure that emails and their use comply with company policies and filters. Most organizations are mandated to store their email communications for a number of years that depend on the compliance and the regulations relevant to that organization and its industry. It is imperative that the email storage solution offers fast and accurate results, and allows its users to perform searches across one or more fields including attachment contents. Solid email storage software would provide Boolean search functionality to meet the need for highly targeted searches.

Apart from the legal aspect, email storage software offers benefits to the business by helping cut IT costs. A web-based UI that allows users to perform searches or retrieve documents for compliance or legal purposes frees up the IT staff’s time from searching and retrieving email. Secondly, by centralizing email communications, email storage software helps offload email servers, like Exchange, from the load – thus enabling faster email for the organization while offering administrators faster backup and restore times for Exchange. A related benefit is that such a good storage solution is more efficient in its storage of email. This means that valuable disk space on the mail server itself will be freed up, while at the same time the storage costs required to keep email communications for the number of years required by legal/industry/internal rules are reduced.

Without email storage software, organizations would tend to quickly run out of space on their mail server and resort to saving old emails in PST files. PST files are spread throughout the organization on individual employees’ computers making it a major, and slow, undertaking should the organization need to search email communications in response to a legal request, for example. Due to their distributed nature, PST files are a problem to backup in a central location – a problem exacerbated by the increasing use of laptops.

In conclusion, good email storage software reduces business risk by enabling an organization to enforce policies over the archived emails, reduce storage costs and enable more efficient IT.

Over time things change. Irrespective of the type or size of the organization, emails and attachments start piling up on the server. Server performance becomes sluggish because of all the files and Exchange starts slowing down due to the ever-increasing volume of emails and attachments stored. Inevitably, backups take longer and longer as storage is used up.

Email storage gets depleted over time and user mailbox quotas are reached. Initially employees will delete emails with large attachments and emails which are unimportant but soon they will have to start deleting more important email. Most people are not comfortable doing this because they would like assurance that should they ever need to refer to an email they know they have it.

Email keeps piling up because email user behavior is changing. Employees are not using their mailbox merely as a store of email but as a personal storage and document store. The inclusion of quick search in Outlook and the frequent exchange of files via email make this change a natural evolution in behavior. This change does not, however, do anything to reduce the impact on email storage – indeed it exacerbates it.

This confluence of factors forces employees to resort to non-optimal solutions to keep their email. Most people use PST files as a way to archive older emails. This is an easy choice: PST files are easy to use; it’s a free option that comes ‘bundled in’ with Outlook. Indeed, Outlook encourages this behavior: users are prompted to enable auto-archiving and all users have to do is click on the ‘Yes’ button and before an IT admin can blink PST files are proliferating all over the network.

PSTs are a compromise to the email storage conundrum: administrators can keep the mail quotas on mailboxes to control email storage requirements on the SBS / Exchange server while employees still get to keep their old email, even if in PST files.

A better solution would be one that obviates the need for such a compromise in the first place. A solution that lets organizations control email storage on the SBS/Exchange server while allowing employees a virtually unlimited mailbox that doesn’t involve the hassles and problems associated with PST files.

Microsoft does not want you to backup PST files

Email is the internet’s original killer app and if your work depends on email then you are most likely using Microsoft Outlook as your email client. Your emails, tasks, calendar items and contacts are stored in Personal Folders files (.pst). It is therefore very important to backup PST files as they contain such important information. But the truth is it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Microsoft itself provides a tool to backup PST files, called pfbackup. However this tool runs only on old versions of Outlook and Windows. There are other third-party tools to backup PST files but they all suffer from the same set of problems. Some of the tools can back up the PST files only when Outlook is closed. This alone makes it inconvenient for most people – people forget to switch off Outlook at the end of each day just before leaving the office and running the backup. This also has the downside of making only a daily backup, leaving users to face the potential loss of an entire day’s worth of email. Another major problem with tools which back up PST files locally is that email is not available online, or even accessible from another machine – a problem nowadays, as people need the ability to access their email from anywhere.

Online Email Backup

Some PST backup software fixes this issue by backing up email online. This makes the email available anywhere which is certainly convenient. The only problem is getting the PST file online in the first place. For small PST files, backing up online is not a problem but with the ever increasing volume of email, PST files grow to GBs in size. Thus, any time backup software tries to backup the file, they will have to upload the entire PST file. And because every time an email is sent or received the PST file is marked as changed, the entire PST will need to be uploaded again. Clearly, not a workable solution!

PST files are a convenient form of keeping emails for home users perhaps, but for organisations, where email is crucial to their running, PST files just won’t do. Small and medium businesses face ever increasing storage costs on their Exchange server, higher help desk costs to support end-users, as well as need to meet legal or regulatory obligations. Trying to tackle these three goals with PST files is an exercise in frustration – and increasing costs.

The PST Alternative

There is however an alternative to PST files that gives up none of the ease of use, without the downsides. An SME-focused archiving solution will remove the need for PST files by keeping a centralized repository of emails, thus ensuring that all emails are effectively backed up without needing any user intervention. Another benefit of an archiving solution confers is that storage is used much more efficiently through the use of compression and single-instancing of email. This also has the additional benefit of allowing Exchange admins to offload Exchange by letting them set tighter quotas on mailboxes. Of course, for an archiving solution to work, it must offer seamless Outlook integration with the email archiving solution that requires minimal to no end-user training.

Managing PST and making a PST backup, is fraught with costs and hidden productivity losses. An email archiving solution that’s focused on the needs of SMBs will truly keep email secure, but also bring additional benefits to the organisation.