The award is a great honour and we were excited to have an excuse to share some celebratory buns with some of our UK resellers and give ourselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

We know our products offer great solutions to businesses, but it takes great support from our sales channel to help us spread the word, so it’s lovely to be recognised once in a while.

It seems our resellers really like cake too – our friends at EOS IT Solutions were kind enough to share their moment of celebration with us:

And this story doesn’t have to end here.  GFI MailArchiver is a finalist for the Storage Awards Archiving & Compliance Product of the Year.   We just need your votes because, well, votes mean prizes, and prizes mean…. yum.

To vote for GFI MailArchiver in the storage awards go here.

While cloud-based email protection has brought many advantages to business, migrating from one provider to another can pose challenges. The Google product forums about the difference in services offered by Google may well be cause for concern for current  customers.

Google has recognized the importance of assisting their customers no matter what their end choice of service was. As part of this, Postini includes an option that allows customers to export their existing email addresses, whitelists and blacklists into a comma-separated file.

GFI® has stepped in to facilitate an easy transition from Postini to GFI MailEssentials Online by creating a process to simply and easily import these settings into its cloud-based email security service.

Customers wishing to switch can simply sign up for a GFI MailEssentials Online trial, email postini-import@GFI.com with the file created by their Postini export, and GFI will do the rest. Once completed, customers simply receive a notification from GFI.

The GFI MailEssentials Online service is channel-friendly, has excellent partner and end-user support based in the United States, and is a focused email security solution providing anti-virus and anti-spam protection, along with built-in email continuity (which was not bundled with Postini’s filtering service), plus an optional integrated archive. The service is very easy to use and gives  customers comprehensive protection and peace of mind.

Learn more on how your business can benefit from GFI MailEssentials Online, or start your free trial today!  

You see, I have been pondering the whole Cloud VS On-premise conundrum.  Does one approach exclude the other?  Cloud is certainly today’s big thing, but does it mean there is no place for your trusty on-premise solutions anymore?  Specifically, what does it mean for potential and existing customers of GFI MailArchiver?

Many companies are moving their email and other business services to the Cloud.  The demise of Windows SBS, meaning companies are moving to cloud-based Office 365, and the growth in popularity of Google apps for business make this a natural step for small businesses.  And why not?  The potential benefits and flexibility of cloud-based business solutions are undeniable.

But what does that mean for a company’s archiving solution?  Does that need to ‘go Cloud’ too?  Not necessarily.  In fact, maintaining an on-premise archiving solution could be a smart move.  You get to enjoy the benefits and flexibility of a cloud-based email service, and yet still remain in control of what is unquestionably your most important source of company information – your complete communications history.  Remember, we are potentially talking not just about email, but documents, fax and text messages*, voicemail** and all associated attachments here too.

So, an on-premise archive of all company communications and business critical documents is the ultimate worst case scenario backup when you lose connection with the outside world – dare I say it – your silver lining during a cloud-burst.  For some, the thought that a copy of what matters most to their business is still under their own roof, is the ultimate in peace of mind.

If business continuity is not enough to persuade someone to keep a foot in both the on-premise and cloud camps for archiving, then legal compliance and potential e-discovery requests are further reasons that a company might hesitate before leaving their businsess-critical data completely out in the wild.  Cloud-based archiving services often offer some level of e-discovery and compliance features, but not necessarily at the granular level that would make the retrieval of all the relevant data quick and easy when faced with an urgent legal issue.

Finally, and to my mind most important of all, is the potential gold mine that your on-premise archive can be.  When you think of the valuable data held in the archive – sales negotiations, legal documents, confidential conversations, customer opinions – all this information has the potential to help managers identify business issues and drive business strategy.  So long as you have an archiving solution with the reporting tools that allow you to tap into it, that is.

The answer?  GFI MailArchiver, of course.  Then you really can have your cake and eat it.  In fact, somebody put the kettle on…

*If used in conjunction with a fax service like GFI FaxMaker®

**If you are set up to receive voicemails as email attachments

And so email has become THE crucial tool when doing business. Often, email messages are the only record you have of important transactions. Losing or deleting an important email or attachment can be a nightmare. Being able to retrieve an email or file instantly, wherever you are, can be vital.

Thankfully the arrival of smart phones, tablets and other neat gadgets, and software makes this crazy, on-the-go lifestyle possible. And this has also been front of mind here at GFI Software™ when we were working on the latest release of GFI MailArchiver® 2012.

As it seems we can’t live without email anymore, we reckon the email archive is probably one single place you need to have access to at all times from your gadget of choice. So in GFI MailArchiver 2012 we have added the important connectivity protocol, IMAP, to allow new ways to access your archive store.

With IMAP you can access your email archive from your favorite email client, without the need to install any additional software on your end-user device. Archived email can be accessed just the same way as you access your normal email; your archived email timeline will look just like your day-to-day email timeline. Using the MailArchiver IMAP Server you can easily configure your iPad, iPhone, Android phone or tablet to access archived emails. And for those users who just use a desktop, you can also configure Outlook or Thunderbird to use IMAP.

We’ve made setting up the email client to use the GFI MailArchiver IMAP Server pretty straightforward for users. We have included a help section with simple steps for configuring the popular clients to get emails downloaded on your device. This should be all users need to configure their own devices – so hopefully this will make the IT administrator’s life easier!

Here’s a little more detail…

With IMAP, email messages on the GFI MailArchiver server will be duplicated on your device. Each mail client will have a different configuration that is targeted for the device. For example, mobile devices won’t download the whole email but just parts of it such as the headers (to save bandwidth costs) and will download body or attachments only when requested. Other clients like the desktop clients can be configured to download entire emails.

And finally, aside from giving you access to your emails anytime and anywhere, the important thing about IMAP is that it is secure and can be transmitted encrypted over an SSL channel. When practically all there is to know about a company can be found in email somewhere, we have to ensure that all the GFI MailArchiver features that we offer can keep your corporate data safe. So IMAP encryption is vital if emails are going to be transmitted over a different network and outside of company infrastructure.
We’re rather proud of this new GFI MailArchiver 2012 release.

Have a look at what GFI MailArchiver can do for you, or just download a free 30-day trial and give it a spin!