The need to provide users with quick and easy access to old e-mail messages is a business requirement that isn't reserved just to large companies or those in regulated industries. Small businesses rely on the ability to access the content of e-mail messages as much or more than their bigger cousins. And, this need is likely to increase gradually as more and more smaller organizations are required to quickly produce e-mail evidence during legal proceedings, or face penalties when they can't.
Even excluding the growing legal reasons, since most smaller companies don't have a content management system, they tend to rely on e-mail storage as their primary source of corporate memory of all interactions with external stakeholders and amongst themselves.
For its long-term repository of e-mail, most small organizations rely on back-up tapes. However, because messages on backup tapes are not indexing, searching for specific messages is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, even when e-mail volumes are small.
The other approach commonly chosen is to keep all the mail on the mail-server. This strategy also relies on tape backups. Should the mail server crash, all the mail would be lost and can only be recovered, by restoring the entire server from one of the back-up tapes. Even though with this approach, the mail server and all of its mail can be restored, over time this may not be so convenient. As the size of the message store increases, the time it takes to perform a back-up also increases, and most importantly so does the time it takes to restore a mail-server. An additional important shortfall of relying on the mail-server for archival storage is that mail-servers are typically not that efficient at providing users with e-mail searching capabilities.
E-mail archiving provides a searchable repository of messages going back many years. However, because most e-mail archiving systems were designed for larger companies, they are unaffordable for most of these smaller organizations. Some organizations are reluctant to commit to an e-mail archiving solution because it locks them to a particular messaging architecture.
NorthSeas just released a free e-mail archiving solution for companies with less than 50 users. Small organizations can install the free software on a 1U server, turning it into an e-mail archiving appliance, or on VMware, as a virtual appliance. The software is not only free, it's also upgradeable to a 50+ user license, and vendor-independent.
For product information, go to http://www.northseas.com/
