Email archiving solutions used to be nice-to-have; but today they have moved into the realm of business necessity. In his post Six Tips on Email Archiving Solutions, Carl E. Reid outlined some of the compelling reasons why businesses need an email archiving solution. In a recent review of GFI MailArchiver, Tom Olak, CISSP, pointed out some of the specific challenges which businesses face. Those include:

• Messages distributed across hundreds of end-user devices in personal archive files (e.g. .PST)
• The ability to efficiently search thousands of messages for one or more pieces of information, as specified in a discovery request, possibly extending over several years
• The ability to place on hold messages identified as relevant to a discovery request
• Enforcement of retention policies
• Efficient use of storage
• Easy access to archives by end-users and administrators
• Maintain acceptable overall performance of production messaging system

Ok, so you need to be archiving your email, but can you archive without the expense of third-party solution? Yes, you can. Maybe. Sorta. Kinda. For example, with Exchange Server 2007 it’s possible to get the job done by using a combination of Managed Folders, retention and storage quota limits and Transport Rules (if you want to find out exactly how, see the instructions that Brien Posey, MCSE, MVP posted over at SearchExchange.com). But, boy, would this be messy. Not only would it be messy, but the management overhead would be enormous and you would have none of the message integrity assurances or other options that a third-party solution would provide.

Microsoft tends to add additional functionality to its products with each release and it’s not at all unlikely that some future edition of Exchange Server will include archiving capabilities. But until that day comes, if you’re serious about archiving – and you certainly should be – a third-party solution is your only viable option.