Best practice: Email archiving

This Best Practice is part of a collection of advice provided by information technology professionals on how they have solved various challenges, and addressed IT priorities within their organizations.

Company:
Quantum Marine Engineering, a Fla.-based company that serves a global marketplace of yacht builders.

The problem:
Faced with ever-growing mailboxes and the need to track particular emails, the company required an email archiving solution to solve these two problems which, if left unaddressed, could have caused problems and loss of business.

The solution:
Quantum Marine used GFI MailArchiver to archive all corporate email and provide easy access to old and deleted emails.

Who provided this information:
Michael H. Bartlett, Quantum Marine Engineering of Florida, Inc.

How it worked:

A customer had asked in an email to us about the suitability of a component they were using to hook up a piece of our equipment. Our sales force and technicians both were adamant about having replied, saying that what they were proposing wasn't suitable; but no one could come up with the email. Within five minutes, we found the email with GFI MailArchiver using a keyword search as well as the whole string and conversation. I also discovered the reason why no one could find it in their Exchange mailboxes: The email with the key to the puzzle had been sent through a couple of techs and finally through a department head who no one had included in the original list of possible responders.

Rules for success:

• Communicate to the users that the archive essentially gives them an unlimited size mailbox. Help them get over "email separation anxiety."
• Enforce the retention policy, and provide plenty of help in working the search features.

Five classic mistakes:

1. Watch out for users who for whatever reason want to have another email storage area on the file server; and instead of using the archive they drag mail to another networked storage location.

2. Watch out for a retention policy that users circumvent- see mistake #1.

3. Watch out for credit card numbers- if customers email a credit card number, it is now in an unencrypted archive.

4. Watch out for users who don't understand that the archive does not copy their Exchange mailbox when you initiate archiving, and then delete all the mail they've saved and then need a restore.

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