Introduction | What It Is? | General Features | Administrative Features | Content Admin Features | Email & Data Features | Specifications | Licensing | Questions to Ask | Topology Diagram | Business Case | Data Sheet | Narrated Demo | PowerPoint

Email Management and Archiving for Microsoft Exchange

Introduction
Email is the most widely accepted form of business communication and will only grow in adoption and use over the next few years. Many companies have found that paper based documents and digital assets, like email are difficult to store together electronically. In heavily regulated industries like financial services, brokerage, banking, healthcare as well as verticals that require complete project, litigation or discovery documentation are turning to system integrator for a solution to their email woes.

What Is It?
Leveraging “best-of-breed” products such as Sherpa Software’s Archive and Mail Attender for Exchange and Lotus, now critical exchange mailbox items such as message, calendar entries, journals, tasks, contacts, sticky notes, etc can be captured into a secure file based archive for storage and retrieval.

Archive Attender = component that allows Exchange level archiving based on 4 different rules: sender, subject, age/date and size as well as quote limits

Mail Attender = component that extends Archive Attender and allows up to 70+ rules for routing email items into the archive. Also includes statistical analysis tools for email item trends. Optional components exist for PST file archiving and eDiscovery.

General Features
• Define up to 74 plus rules and conditions on metadata within an email header, subject, body or attachment. Messages and attachments can be archived based on multiple criteria including: quotas, subject, sender, age, size and location. Additionally, if a more defined search is necessary, Email Management can use specific criteria such as keywords, attachment types and content to locate relevant information for the archive. Once key messages are located, Email Management can move the entire message including the attachment to the archive
• Setup policies that archive based on mailbox quota, thus reducing or eliminating the need for Exchange PST files which become a liability for companies wishing to secure and retain proprietary company emails
• The Sherpa email management solution provides transparent, Exchange level archiving using MAPI.
• Find and store network and/or local PST files

• Leverage additional Sherpa Software tools to search across your companies entire email archive for eDiscovery purposes
• Sherpa’s Email Management was designed to selectively move, copy or stub messages from Exchange mailboxes, PST files and public folders to any storage device visible to the application via the network.
• Administrators also have the ability to control and grant access rights to users without deploying any components to user computers.
• With Email Management, users can view their archived messages within Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA) or custom ASP.Net web interface that will allow a user to, sort their archived messages and search for specific messages within the archive. Additionally, users are able to manage their own archived messages by retrieving, restoring and/or deleting messages directly out of the archive.

• Sherpa’s Email Management also supports de-duplication to ensure the same email does not get archived multiple times

Administrative Features
• Quick, efficient installation
• Manage storage limitations on the Exchange Server
• Manage compliance requirements by enabling journaling on Exchange and using Archive Attender to archive messages from the journaling mailbox
• Archive messages and attachments to an external storage device from Exchange mailboxes and PST files
• Customize archiving policies to specific mailboxes, entire Exchange servers or Active Directory groups
• Replace the original message with a plaintext or html-based stub which contains a link, to give users immediate access to the archived message
• Multi-thread processing architecture optimized for quick and easy retrieval of archived messages by end-users
• Archive messages based on quotas, subject, sender, date, age, location and size
• Archive messages and attachments based on keywords, types of attachments, content, etc.
• Drive processing with Microsoft Powershell scripts
• Define process scheduling Windows based on flexible start and end times
• Enforce retention policies to delete or move archived messages to secondary storage
• Maintain a comprehensive audit trail of all activity performed on the archived messages
• Administrators can search and copy messages from the archive into a mailbox or into a PST file
• Control the level of access to the archive provided to each user including the ability to search and restore messages

Content Administration
• Powerful searching of message subject, body and attachments
• Customizable search criteria includes keywords, age, size, name, date, type, status, and wildcards
• Manage search results efficiently based upon action policies such as delete, move, export, copy, forward, replace and change status
• Immediately locate and eliminate all known virus infected attachments
• Search recovered items folders (Dumpsters)
• Seamlessly examine the growth rate of desktops, servers and the enterprise
• Archive (export) ability moves storage to Fortis as well as other file systems and/or WORM/DVD devices
• Size and age policy enforcement eliminates files overusing space, targeting top offenders
• Zip large attachments
• Copy or archive individual public folder branches for easy recovery

Email Data and Reporting
• Collect specific usage data to make informed decisions
• Report on age, size, and content of messages (such as attachments, users, folders or servers)
• Measure space utilization and reclamation statistics
• Share, email or post reports automatically
• Alert administrators and users to utilization limits and problems
• Warn users of flagged items of concern

Specifications and Requirements
• Works with Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003, and 2007
• Installation not required on the location of the information store (except in the case of desktops)
• Smooth, efficient communication between the master service and the client processing engines
• Data maintained in an ODBC compliant database
• Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista
• Dot Net Framework 2.0 (installed automatically as needed)
• MDAC 2.7
• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
• Outlook 98, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007 or Exchange Server
• Approx. 50MB footprint on installation
• Allocate additional space for the growth of the database
• MSMQ (if synchronizing with other installations)

Licensing
• Sherpa is licensed by the number of mailboxes monitored. Root public folder trees count as one license. If a user or mailbox is removed the existing license is released and is made available for other users or groups
• Sherpa Archive Attender comes with an ASP.Net web interface that can be deployed without a per connection license fee. The web interface is extensible outside a firewall and uses either HTTP or HTTPS protocols for communicating with the Exchange server

Questions to Ask
• What are your email policies and how are they enforced?
• Do your email policies address the need to reduce storage costs, increase security, and reduce liability?
• What are you doing with outbound emails?
• How do your email policies differ by department?
• Are you aware of compliance mandates that affect email archiving and retention?
• Are you within the financial services, healthcare or banking industries? If so, are you in compliance with strict regulations around email management?

Business Case
• KKE, a Minneapolis, MN based architectural firm realized that projects consisted of both stored paper files and electronic content like emails. Each project consisted of a Microsoft Exchange public folder tree that architects and knowledge workers used to collaborate
• When a project was complete the paper files where boxed and then taken away to an offsite collocation facility. This created disparities when post project questions or litigation were requested. Now the company can locate and match all content associated with projects. They now have a long term strategy for content management
• Also, emails that arrive into a project teams mailbox can be quickly archived to the main project public folder by simply dragging. This provides a convenient mechanism for enforcing corporate policies.
• When a project has been closed for 90 days, custom policy actions initiate a complete archive of the project to the document management system. The DMS system then provides records management based on the approved legal retention schedule
• Retrieval of past project emails is simple. Leveraging the Sherpa Email Management stubbing action, users can quickly query either their Exchange mailbox via header data like subject, sender, date/time etc which will present a link to the full message in the DMS or users can launch the DMS web or thick client interfaces. A fourth option is to use the inherent Sherpa ASP.Net portal for keyword retrieval. The fifth option is to use the Sherpa thick client admin interface for eDiscovery purposes to search across all monitored mailboxes and/or public folders regardless of user. Case Study>>

Topology