No Need to Rush into Upgrading that Exchange 5.5 Server

Matt Cain, Vice President at Gartner Group this week advised Exchange 5.5 customers not to upgrade to Exchange 2003 saying that it would be better for them to wait and upgrade directly to Exchange 2007 when it's available sometime in 2008. According to Cain, rather than rushing into a 2003 migration, and then to 2007, customers would be better off to wait and take the time to prepare properly for a direct migration to the latest release. Sounds very logical.

However, the severely limited message store capacity of 5.5 gives organizations using this older platform storage nightmares. The thought of extending the life of 5.5 for another 1-2 years is a discomforting one for many. According to Gartner, at least 20% of the current Exchange install base is still on the old 5.5.

Relief from these storage nightmares that 5.5 customers could come in an e-mail archiving solution. But choose one that is economical and simple to deploy because if your e-mail archiving implementation results in excessive cost or complications you might just as well have migrated.

The NorthSeas solution for example, stores mail as files on network storage while keeping an index of metadata on the appliance. Users can search through their archived mail by searching through the index. When a message needs to be retrieved the NorthSeas appliance simply redelivers it to their mailbox (we call it "replay"). When you do decide to upgrade to Exchange 2007, the process for accessing older archived mail remains unchanged and mail retrieved from the archive is again simply replayed to the new mailbox on the 2007 server, instead of to the old 5.5 server. So with a set up like this, only a minimal amount of mail needs to be left on the 5.5 server and yet users are provided with unlimited storage, with any message retrievable within just a few seconds.

If you are looking for product information please go to http://www.northseasamt.com/