Integrating GFI MailArchiver™ with Office 365

If you have even heard of the cloud, then you have probably also heard of Microsoft’s Office 365. This great tool offers companies of any size the ability to host their email, instant messaging, web conferencing, and collaboration in the cloud, giving them all of the capabilities of the onsite versions without the overhead of server maintenance. Services are available in a subscription model, letting customers pay only for what they need. While Office 365 is a complete collaboration suite, it is not a closed system. Customers can deploy co-existent scenarios, keeping some resources onsite, or integrate with various solutions. GFI MailArchiver is the email archiving solution that best fits into this.

Office 365 offers a personal archiving option for users. It also has a native journaling facility, but this uses an email account that is external to the Office 365 environment. Companies needing a centrally controlled archive would be better off using  an email archiving software product, and this is where GFI MailArchiver comes into play. GFI MailArchiver works seamlessly with Office 365 to ensure that all messages to or from any user are archived. It is very easy to set up, and requires no software install or service ticket with Office 365 support. There are really only three basic steps:

1. As the Office 365 administrator, you need to first set up an Office 365 mailbox as a temporary store for all messages.
2. Then, you create a simple transport rule using the web portal that BCCs all email to the journaling mailbox.
3. Finally, you configure GFI MailArchiver to connect to this mailbox using IMAP so it can archive all messages. And you’re done.

Email archiving software solves many business needs. Companies with legal or regulatory compliance requirements  and those wishing to ensure that their intellectual property is preserved over time can use email archiving software to fully meet those obligations.

Email is a critical information channel for companies of any size, with business transactions with customers and vendors transacted over email every day. Meeting notes, design discussions, and business decisions often reside only in email, and users exchange how-to documentation using email all the time. Creating an archive preserves this invaluable data in a searchable form, ensuring that the intellectual capital can be reused and protected from loss that could come about from users deleting messages that they no longer consider important. It also provides an easy way for management to ensure compliance with company policy, and for IT to fulfill eDiscovery requests.

Read our GFI MailArchiver and Office 365 deployment guide to learn more on how this works.

About the Author: Christina Goggi

Christina is Web Marketing Content Specialist at GFI Software. She is a keen blogger and has contributed content to several IT sites, besides working as an editor and regular contributor to Talk Tech to Me. Christina also writes for various publications including the Times of Malta and its technology supplement.