Now where did that email go?

If you are like me, Outlook pretty much manages your whole life. It tracks daily activities, important appointments, phone numbers, addresses and perhaps most importantly, critical information that has been received or sent through email. How in the world is a person supposed to find important email?

Email is the defacto method for communicating. It's a written history or journal of important information. However, there is a limit to how much can be kept in Outlook and Exchange. Too much data on an exchange server can even shut it down. Policies make it difficult when you need something outside the age limit. You may not always be good at keeping your mailbox lean with only important content and removing the unneeded. Creating subfolders helps in organizating information but it doesn't reduce mailbox size. Archiving to a seperate pst is helpful but it can only grow so large also AND what if your system crashes? Local archive files are not usually backed up since the data isn't on the server so that's your responsibility.

What about managers and business owners (remember, they own your email) who want to monitor confidential information, review employee/client communications or what if an owner gets sued and discover that the unhappy employee deleted all relevant email so proof can't be produced! Never mind the time, effort and cost required because the court ordered you to produce all relavant messages within 90 days!

Well, there is a solution. If you want to be able track selected or all messages that come and go from your business for convenience, monitoring, compliance or legal purposes, you can. Exchange has a feature called Journalling. This feature allows the capture of every message sent or received from your Exchange server and sends it to a designated email address. To get a better understanding, read this article.

Journalling your exchange messages guarantees you have a copy of everything. No worries if you or an employee deletes a critical message. However, you may still have the laborious task of finding the message. To solve that task, there are several third party message archiving solutions out there.

Proabably the most affordable and easiest to implement is an appliance solution from Arcmail Technology called the Defender. The Defender accepts your journalled email from Exchange, indexes it and provides a web interface so you can quickly retrieve messages based on content, date, recipient and sender. You can view a demo of how the Defender works by clicking this link.

The Defender is about as simple as it gets for archiving and managing messages. After installing the defender, Exhange message retention policies can be set to keep your Exchange Server running lean and mean without creating stress for removing messages. No more complaints about your mailbox being too large and no stress over managing archive files!

Call or email for more info on the Defender. Mention you read this blog post and receive 10% off the cost of a Defender purchased through bitMASTERS Corporation.