Email Archiving for Compliance

Quest Archive Manager 3.0
Quest Software's recently released Quest Archive Manager 3.0 is based on technology acquired in its purchase of AfterMail in January. Archive Manager is the only full archiving product in this review to provide a 100 percent Web-based front end.

Archive Manager uses SQL Server to store message and indexing data. File attachments are stored on the file system, once per unique attachment. Setting policies to define which mailboxes and messages are archived is fairly straightforward. The policies are limited to archiving by message age, size, read status, or flagged status. You can copy a message to the archive, strip the message (replace it with a stub message), or delete it from the mailbox.

Archive Manager doesn't provide any offline support. Once messages are stripped or deleted from users' mailboxes, users have no way to get to those messages if they can't access the archive. Another weakness in the product is that importing PST data is a manual process.

Archive Manager provides granular delegation support to let managers or auditors access certain archived messages or mailboxes or specific Archive Manager functions. Archive Manager can also use existing AD groups to control access. However, unlike Symantec Enterprise Vault, Archive Manager requires you to manually configure delegation over who can access which mailboxes.

A unique feature of the product is its support for virtual mailboxes. You can group messages from multiple mailboxes into one mailbox and delegate access to that virtual mailbox.

Archive Manager's main console for viewing-data, shown in Figure 6, provides extensive support for searching and the ability to browse data in the same folder structure as Outlook's. Not only does Archive Manager show the entire message and headers, it lets you add comments and tags to messages that you can then search on. Archive Manager keeps a detailed audit trail so that users who have the appropriate access can view what searches have been carried out, which messages have been viewed, and who has viewed a given message. In addition, you can save searches and view search results via any Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader.

Picking a Winner
Symantec's Enterprise Vault earned the highest rating in this review at 4.5 diamonds. Enterprise Vault has been on the market for a while, and that shows in the product's feature depth. Enterprise Vault's support for multiple data sources provides one-stop archiving for an organization, and its ability to distribute components across multiple systems and support for third-party storage solutions make it scalable.

Enterprise Vault has many user-and administrator-friendly features. PST management is one feature that really stands out. In addition, end users are minimally affected by archiving due to the product's offline support and its completely seamless access to archived messages.

Mimosa's NearPoint provides unique and significant value with its Exchange backup and restore capabilities that exceed those of most normal backup software. I suspect that this young product's limited policy, PST, and public folder support will improve in future versions and that NearPoint will grow into a very capable email archiving product. Quest's newly acquired Archive Manager, with its attractive UI and easy installation, will also be a major contender in this space, once it adds offline and better PST support.

Other archiving products not included in this review but worth a look are EMC's E-mailXtender Archive Edition and the ZANTAZ EAS product family.