Avoiding Merger/Acquisition Headaches using Vendor-Neutral E-mail Archiving

We are often told by customers and partners that one of the attractions for IT departments of vendor-neutral e-mail storage is that they don't need to make a wholesale system replacement in the event they are involved in a merger or acquisition with a company using a different messaging system.

When messages in the archive repository are stored in a vendor-neutral format, they are available to users and administrators pretty much on-demand, regardless of what mail-server and client application is in use during either capture or retrieval. This means that it is possible for an organization with diverse messaging systems to operate with a single repository of all corporate e-mail without forcing users to move to one standard application.

Let's say an organization running Exchange exclusively acquires a company who only uses Notes:

• Beginning immediately after the acquisition, all of the Notes-user's mail can now be captured in the same repository that contains the mail for Exchange users - all of it in a vendor-neutral format.
• Administrators can execute enterprise-wide searches and retrieve any message(s) to their inbox (or send it to someone elses mailbox), regardless of the messaging system used when the message was originally captured.
• If one of the merging parties was to subsequently change it's e-mail system (e.g. adopt the system used by the parent company), all of the e-mail captured while using their old system, would now be available to them on their new system.

There is a reason why IT people hate merger/acquisition announcements - because in most cases, they mean BIG migration headaches. With vendor-neutral e-mail archiving, this migration can be avoided - or at least deferred to a more convenient time - without losing that all important single central searchable repository.