10 key considerations for email archiving
If you haven't standardized on an email archiving product, it can be time-consuming to find one that fits your company's needs. We list the 10 questions that will help you narrow down the list of available products and find the one that best suits your requirements.
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Email archiving products vary in their features and technical structures. Here's how to select an archiving tool that's a good fit for your company's needs. When examining an email archiving product, it's important to know how well it's suited to the specific requirements of the email system it's intended to protect. I've reviewed many of these products and compared their functionality to the requirements of dozens of companies. The following 10 questions will help you narrow down the available email archiving products to those that best serve your needs. Not all of the following 10 questions will be important to every storage environment, but each one should be considered when making a product selection. You should decide whether or not a particular function is important in your environment. Not all email archiving implementations require legal-hold capability, for example. There can also be a spectrum of answers to each question, and not every environment needs the most extreme, feature-rich solution. There are many considerations beyond the technical issues outlined here (see "Email retention policy," below). One of the primary deciding factors in any technology purchase is cost, which itself includes many variables. Vendor reputation, customer service and geographic support coverage may all influence product selection. While these factors aren't taken into account in this article, any one of them may have an impact and must be carefully considered.
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Most email clients store personal archives on local disks, so these may be anywhere your users are, including laptops, desktops, network shares and portable drives. This makes importing archives tricky, as they must first be located and consolidated. Not every system can handle all formats, which can range from Outlook PST to Notes NSF, to Unix mbox and maildir files. No matter where historic messages are imported from, the archive that contains them should be flagged as incomplete and potentially unreliable if ediscovery is a consideration. Both email servers and personal archives are almost certainly missing a great many messages. It's a trivial operation to change the content of most personal archives; modern email archive systems are far more tamper-proof.
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The process of declaring and releasing a legal hold can be complex. Holds normally cover a range of dates and systems, and the scope can change as discussions between the parties take place. Usually, a specialized third-party legal-hold program offers more functionality than one that's part of the archive application. Another frequent objection to integrated hold-and-search features is the preference of the legal team. Ediscovery has become common in the last decade, so most attorneys have gone through the process a few times by now. It's likely their past experience with specialized litigation support software will lead them to request that solution instead of an unfamiliar one bundled with an email archiving system.
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