Email Archiving for Compliance

Archive Attender 2.5 and Mail Attender for Exchange Enterprise 3.6
Sherpa Software has multiple products that focus on data discovery, reporting, and archiving for Exchange and Lotus Notes. The combination of two products—Archive Attender and Mail Attender for Exchange Enterprise—provides the functionality required for this review. Archive Attender, which Figure 2 shows, lets you archive messages based on folder, age, size, and mailbox. Mail Attender lets you send data to Archive Attender, produce detailed reports about messages and mailboxes, and manage mailboxes, public folders, and ISs. Mail Attender uses SQL Server to store policies and settings; Archive Attender stores all data in the Windows file system.

Archive Attender creates an Outlook folder that lets users easily search for and view messages that have been archived. When Archive Attender archives a message, it leaves a stub message behind to inform the user that the message was archived and provides a URL link to the message. Unfortunately, users working offline can't access any messages removed or replaced with stub messages. Archive Attender and Mail Attender also have no support for delegating access to messages.

Archive One Policy 4.2
C2C's Archive One Policy is focused on providing the key features needed to archive messages, manage mailbox and database size, and search the archived data. You can define multiple repositories, also known as archive stores, so that you can store data at different physical locations and with different retention settings. Archive One Policy also supports setting up multiple servers, a requirement for geographically dispersed organizations, and synchronizing settings across the servers. On the administration side, Archive One Policy has a granular delegation model that you can use to give users access to other users' mailboxes or to areas in the administration console.

The policies supported by the product, some of which are shown in Figure 3, are among the most extensive and flexible that I saw in the products I reviewed. You can use them to control what gets archived, deleted, copied, moved, unarchived, or just listed in reports on mailboxes, PSTs, and public folders. You can email the results and reports from policy executions to users or administrators. Archive One Policy fully supports PSTs in all archiving rules and discovers them by means of a standalone executable that you can run from a logon script or on an as-needed basis on clients.

Archive One Policy adds two new folders to users' mailboxes, the Retrieved messages folder and a folder used to access the Web-based search page. You can search against message subject, body, recipient, date, and attachments and across multiple mailboxes. Administrators can also save frequently used searches in the Archive Search folder in the console.

When a message is archived, it's replaced with a stub message in the original location. The stub message contains a customizable part of the original message body (by default, the first 1KB of text) and a URL link to the full message. When a message is restored, it's opened for the user and copied into the user's Retrieved messages folder. The stub message is left in its current format and location in the mailbox. An administrator can restore messages from the results of an archive search to a public folder or PST file. It would be nice to be able to restore messages to the original user's mailbox or another user's mailbox.

Archive One Policy provides offline support that keeps any messages archived from the user's mailbox in a local cache that works similarly to Outlook's offline support. When the user is online, Archive One Policy retrieves the data from the product's server; otherwise, it uses the local cache.