Tony is talking about email archiving (a “fundamentally boring topic”), but you have to do things about this. See CMS Watch.

Agenda:
– message mountain
– business drivers
– what the technology does
– marketplace 2008 analysis

Message Mountain
From Oracle, active documents were about 1m documents and 21m emails during the past 30 days, and for 5 years, 55m archived documents and 1.3b archived emails.

From Open Text, total petabytes of digital content by creation type … newspapers is 100 petabytes of newspapers, and up to 300 petabytes of email content.

Business Drivers
There are many:
– to prepare for legal discovery and holds.
– to meet legal or compliancy requirements regarding information management.
– to improve the performance of their email environment.
– to reduce data volumes on email servers
– to provide backup and disaster recovery
– to better manage storage costs and needs. Vendors will say “storage is cheap”, but a Nationwide study found that while 1GB of hardware costs $0.22, it costs $3500 per year per gigabyte once everything is taken into consideration.

The Technology
What does the technology really do?
– manage email over the long term — for many years — but not in the email server
– search and retrieve email regardless of age or status
– identify and attach a retention schedule to email that contains business critical information
– configure email to be compliant if the enterprise facing legal action. Eg, to put a hold on something, to show that you have the complete email thread and/or attachments.
– account for email across a life cycle that terminates with archiving and/or disposition.

Functional capabilities — three main things:
– capturing the email. Two main ways … capture at the gateway, or “journalling” on the server. Gateway-capture only misses internal things, and journalling requires more processing power.
– policy management
– retrieval

Tony showed some products:
– Open Text Livelink, with good search against the email archive.
– Mimosa NearPoint, a plug-in for Outlook that connects to a hosted service.
– Computer Associates Message Manager. Really an email monitoring tool.
– Zantas eDiscovery system

Marketplace Analysis 2008
Key trends for 2008:
– In the past 18 months, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Google and EMC moved significantly into email archiving.
– vendors have replaced their first generation solutions with new approaches.
– vendors and buyers differ dramatically on what is considered to be important.
– approaches differ by geography, based on legal requirements in different areas.
– hosted services are increasingly popular, because they are easy to do.