Review

From Network Computing Vol 18 No 06 November/December 2009

Email archiving is a business driven requirement that is just as important to SMBs as it is to enterprises. However, the majority of products available in today's market are either too complex, too expensive, or both, for an SMB to consider. ArchiveOne Express from C2C arrives to redress this imbalance by offering an Exchange archiving solution that requires virtually no training, and at a price that isattractive to smaller businesses.

ArchiveOne Express has a solid foundation as it employs core technologies from C2C's ArchiveOne Enterprise. Express is designed to support 20-200 Exchange mailboxes, and it has ease of use high on its agenda. SMBs are unlikely to want a multitude of complex archiving policies, so Express offers a single set of easy-to-manage policies that are applied to an entire Exchange server.

For testing we used a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server running MS SBS 2003, which included an Exchange Server configured with 200 mailboxes. We heartily agree with C2C's fifteen minute installation claim; general configuration is also handled smoothly and on first contact a wizard sets up a group of default archiving policies. During this phase you can modify the policies to suit. For example, you can provide archive and email ranges in years, choose a repository for archived email, and decide whether to use email age or mailbox size, as archive triggers. Exchange journaling is also covered and a wizard creates an archiving policy for the mailbox that receives copies of all emails to ensure that it doesn't get too large.

The Express administrative interface is very intuitive and policy scheduling has been simplified, as you decide on daily or weekly intervals and a start time. These settings are applied globally to all policies, although they can also be run on-demand. Adding mailboxes is a swift affair as the Mailbox Manager displays all Exchange users, groups, and contacts for individual or multiple selections. Default archive settings are applied to all those imported, but you can change individual properties such as the archive repository. A useful security feature is the option to permit specific AD users the right to search through other user's mailboxes.

The archive process proved to be very swift with a status screen updating on progress. We particularly liked the ability to pull up highly detailed HTML reports for selected archiving runs, and these are presented in a familiar Outlook mailbox style. Local PST files don't get off lightly as Express offers serious management for these as well. Simply running the PST Processor utility on each system, via a login script, will discover all PSTs. Applying some rules, such as deleting certain attachment types, can radically reduce the size of a PST. It is this redacted file that is then archived as directed by policy. This allows troublesome PSTs to be completely eliminated within an Exchange environment, in turn improving content visibility for compliance.

User training is minimal as archived emails are shown in their Outlook folders with a new envelope icon, and accessed as normal. Email can be retrieved from the archive and reinstated into the Exchange mailbox using a variety of methods, including double-clicking on the message, or selecting the URL appended at the bottom of all archived messages. Full eDiscovery facilities are provided as well. All archives can be searched using a range of criteria for content, source, status and repository. Messages in the search results can be sent to other mailboxes, public folders or new PSTs, and can even be put on litigation-hold, so that they cannot be deleted.

ArchiveOne Express achieves its aims admirably with both easy deployment and use. We were also very impressed with C2C's knowledgeable and helpful support staff. Express is very affordable for SMBs, but don't be fooled, as it is a very sophisticated Exchange archiving solution.

Product: ArchiveOne Express
Supplier: C2C
Tel: 0118 951 1211
Web site:www.c2c.com
Price: 20 mailboxes -£495 excluding VAT

Review