Look Out, Outlook: Spring Cleaning

Taking it literally, you’d think that an email retention policy would have something to do with actually retaining some emails. But when my company enforced its new guidelines, it involved a whole lot more deleting than keeping. My bold resistance soon met defeat, followed by pouting and eventually resulting in understanding. In “Establishing an Email Retention Policy: The IT Perspective” (InstantDoc ID 101728), I was reminded of all the hard work IT heroes put into company-wide policy changes like this. So in remembrance of the six months worth of email messages I’ll never see again, here are my top six email resources that I hope will help you for years to come.

“Exchange Management Tools Compared” (February 2009, InstantDoc ID 101054): Find out how Microsoft Exchange management tools MessageStats 4.0, PROMODAG Reports 8.4, and AppAnalyzer 4.01 match up in William Lefkovics’s product comparison. See which product best assesses over- and underuse.

“Modernizing Exchange Server Backup and Recovery” (March 2009 web-exclusive, InstantDoc ID 101488): Brien M. Posey offers tips on improving your backup system and explains the performance and recovery problems with tape backup. Learn how disk-to-disk-to-tape backup often offers advanced capabilities that you can't achieve through traditional backups, and how this solution might be right for your organization.

“Xobni” (March 2009, InstantDoc ID 101726): Windows IT Pro editor Anne Grubb overviews the cool new Outlook add-on called Xobni—that’s inbox spelled backwards. Check out her step-by-step guide on how to get started, and find out if this tool could help you.

“What Exchange/Outlook APIs Should I Use for Applications?” (March 2009, web-exclusive, InstantDoc ID 101503): William Lefkovics clears up the “dizzying array of APIs and technologies to access Outlook and Exchange data for application development and design.”

“Virtualizing Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 with Hyper-V” (April 2009, InstantDoc ID 101294): In this subscriber-only exclusive article, Brien M. Posey overviews what you should consider, the processes you can follow, and the requirements you need to meet to virtualize Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2003 with Hyper-V.

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You can find more Exchange and Outlook resources at windowsitpro.com/MicrosoftExchangeOutlook, or send me an email at Christan.Humphries@penton.com. Just make sure to put "Urgent" in the subject and add a few flags so it makes it through my email retention net!