Everyone knows that without an active practice of management in place that our lives and every facet of our businesses can result in a chaotic existence. We need to manage our checking accounts, our income and expenses, the food we eat, the amount of paperwork we keep, etc.

The same concept of management applies to our email systems. We need to implement a usage and accounting email system to track and report how much of our computer resources are being consumed so that we can properly bill out to the various departments we support in our organizations.

Administrators also need to monitor the flow of emails that are incoming and outgoing from their systems so as to create trending reports and to project when systems will become overloaded. Trending and analysis of email communications make it easier for administrators to request additional resources from their IT departments in terms of bringing newer and larger systems online. It may be that those resources are physical in nature or that the newly requested resources are virtual resources. The point is that, without monitoring and managing their systems resource usage and having the corresponding reports to support their trend analysis, administrators will have a tougher time in asking for upgrades or more system resources.

Continue reading 5 Email Management Benefits

Exchange 2010 SP1 offers significant capabilities for data storage and retention, all of which can be greatly enhanced by the addition of third party archiving solutions. These solutions can increase mailbox storage to virtually unlimited capacity, provide for search and discovery, reviews for compliance and internal investigations, disaster recover scenarios, and more, all by maintaining a complete record of all messaging that is kept separate from the Exchange infrastructure.

Continue reading 3 Ways to Implement Exchange 2010 Archiving

Email has become a vital part of our lives, crucial in to business and the way we work in this new information age. With literally billions of email messages being sent every single day, it has become quite literally indispensable. Each business worker sends an average of 36 emails a day, and they receive as many as 74 in return. This huge volume brings into sharp focus issues of mailbox size, as well as the attachment size for files that go with the emails that we send and receive.

Specifically, I am considering the issue of email attachments from the perspective of businesses and their employees.

Most corporations, in order to try and balance storage capacity with backup and restore time, and data recovery, will place restrictions on the size of their users’ mailboxes. Companies will also restrict the size of an attachment that users can send via the corporate email server. Sometimes, companies will also place restrictions on the size of email attachments that can be received as well.

Continue reading The Tricky Question of Balancing Mailbox Size Limits

Is your email inbox literally bursting at the seams every time you open it? If it is, then don’t you think that perhaps it’s time to get a little more organized? Having an overflowing email inbox is the main cause of your email client slowing down, and it also means you waste time not being able to find crucial emails in a hurry.

I understand it might seem like a daunting task to get yourself organized, but it’s really not so difficult when you know how. The first step on the road towards organization is cleaning up your inbox, followed by some intelligent archiving of your emails. In this post I’m going to outline my simple Microsoft Outlook system for keeping my emails tidy, and I’ll also throw in some tips on how you can archive your older emails too. And even if you use another email client instead of Outlook, you can probably apply these tips anyway.

The most important tool that Outlook has is the AutoArchive feature. It allows you to do all kinds of things, including directing where archived data should go and specifying how old items need to be before they are archived.

Continue reading 7 Tips For Managing Outlook Email Archives

My colleague Paul Mah recently wrote an excellent article called “The Argument for Smaller Email Inboxes.” In this post, he laid out several compelling reasons why companies may want to limit the size of their users’ inboxes, and I encourage you to review Paul’s article, either before continuing with this one, or after. Every story has two sides, and his post addresses real issues companies may encounter if they simply allow unlimited mailbox size without first assessing their environment.

However, I have been and always will be an advocate for larger mailboxes. The larger, the better, and if you have the infrastructure, and the clients that can support this, I think you’ll understand that this is a great way to go. While my post here will address Microsoft Exchange, several of the ideas are applicable to other mail servers too. Here are my 5 reasons for supporting larger inboxes.

Continue reading 5 Reasons for Larger Email Inboxes

There is little doubt that Microsoft Outlook is one of the leading forces on the desktop email client front, a fact concurred by at least one survey of email clients.  While the increasing acceptance and popularity of Web-based email means that the overall use of Exchange and Outlook has declined in recent years, the majority of corporations are still reliant on Outlook to conduct their business.

With the recent release of Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011, the relevance of Exchange and Outlook looks set to stay.  As you can imagine, it makes sense for a server administrator to not only ensure that the company’s Exchange server is properly maintained and backed-up, but that the desktop side of things run smoothly too.  So what are some common problems in Microsoft Outlook, and what can the savvy IT professional do to pre-empt them before they happen? Continue reading How to Pre-empt Common Problems in Microsoft Outlook

Administrators who have ever deployed or maintained Microsoft Exchange will know that it is no mere e-mail server; more than ever, organisations are integrating access to its contacts, calendaring, and collaboration functionality as part of their core business processes.

One unfortunate complaint that seems to afflict many users though would be the seemingly inevitable slowdowns in Outlook, resulting in an inferior experience when accessing Exchange.  I can certainly identify with the frustration, having first used Microsoft Outlook in the days of Outlook 95.

In order to increase the user satisfaction on your network, let’s take a look at some steps that you can take to ensure that your non-IT colleagues are able to work at their maximum productivity.

1. Upgrade to Outlook 2010
   Organizations looking for a speedier Exchange experience will do well to upgrade to the recently released Outlook 2010, which has been enhanced to improve the handling of e-mails.  Performance tweaks made by Microsoft means that Outlook 2010 is simply more stable and faster, a fact that I can personally attest to. In addition, users dismayed by the poor search capabilities of Outlook 2007 will be pleasantly surprised by its much more capable and faster searching.
   Continue reading Seven Ways to Speed up Your Exchange Experience

We hear a lot of talk these days about the benefits of a hosted Exchange deployment.  Probably reflecting the desires of IT managers on the ground, Microsoft’s latest and greatest version of the Exchange messaging server, better known as Exchange 2010, was touted by Microsoft to be “designed from the ground up” to be equally at ease running as a hosted service or as an on-premise solution.

While running one’s Exchange server on a hosted service certainly does have its allure, e-mail administrators or IT managers ultimately need to consider and weigh the merits of both scenarios carefully.  So when does it make sense for organizations to opt for an on-premise deployment of Exchange?

Let’s take a look at some of them today.

More choice of anti-spam and anti-malware solutions

The state of spam and malware proliferation via e-mail today means there is little tolerance for any Exchange installation that is not protected by some sort of spam and malware filtering.  While most hosted Exchange providers incorporate some form of spam protection, choices offered might be limited or expensive.  The alternative would be to opt for a cloud-based anti-spam service by using MX forwarding, though adding in another hosted service does increase the recurring cost of the hosted Exchange deployment.

On the other hand, an on-premise installation of Microsoft Exchange gives businesses a free rein on whether they want to rely on a cloud-based anti-spam service or a traditional server-deployed solution such as GFI MailEssentials, which allows for a greater degree of configurability.  In fact, it is entirely feasible to deploy both in tandem if necessary.

Continue reading Some Reasons for an On-Premise Deployment of Exchange Server

Email retention is a very important component in every company’s day to day business practices. The reasons are many: legal requirements, efficient use of storage, privacy of corporate email messages and others.

Policies and best practices should be clearly stated in every company’s IT department for how best to archive the multitude of emails that accumulate each day.

Here are some of the best practices and considerations for email archival.

1. Indexing and searching capability should be features of all email archival systems. Companies need to be able to respond quickly to requests for old emails particularly when those requests are coming from legal entities outside of the company. Months and months of email messages can quickly become millions of archived messages. IT departments will need to be able to respond to information requests in the least amount of time possible so as to meet any legal requirements necessary. Having a fully indexed archival message system will support the retrieval of any documents or email messages in a short period of time. In addition, being able to respond to requests for archived emails can help to meet discovery or subpoena requests in a timely manner.
2. Audit trails should be another component of any good email archival system. Companies need to secure and track their archived emails to meet the regulations of the various governing bodies such as the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) that can request specific emails from them. Audit trails can also be used to prove compliance with reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
3. Complete email integrity needs to be maintained so as to meet the rules of evidentiary standards. Email integrity can be maintained by use of electronic signatures and time stamps of each email that is archived, redundancy of archival systems to provide continuous access to archived emails and encryption of email messages to protect against tampering of original data.
4. Virus scanning of all email messages prior to archival should be an additional step in the archival process so as to ensure not only the integrity of archived email messages but also the protection of email system at the time of retrieval of email messages from the archive system.
5. Support of multiple email systems and protocols is another feature that can help to reduce the number of archive systems that are needed within a corporation. Some of the more widely used email systems that ought to be included in an email archive system include: Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, First Class, standard POP3, SMTP and Imap protocols.
6. Administrators should coordinate with their in-house legal department and with the department managers of the various business units that the IT organization is responsible for supporting. Those department managers may have additional requirements for email archiving of their employees emails based on their applications used and types of businesses they engage in. And legal departments can also provide guidance in the necessary archival rules and regulations which the company as a whole must comply with.
7. Know what time periods are required by specific regulations when determining how long to keep email messages in the archives. Some companies do not routinely rotate their archived email messages out to the bit bucket and as expected continue to drive up their storage and administrative costs unnecessarily. The more email messages that are stored then the more indexes are required and longer search times than are necessary will occur.
8. Designate someone within the IT organization who is the interface to the legal department. In smaller organizations the legal department will most likely be an outside law firm. Schedule regular quarterly reviews of the laws and regulations specific to your industry that have mandates related to email retention requirements. Some of these compliance laws, regulations, and standards that can impact how email is retained include: the Federal E-Discovery Rules; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA); the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX); the PCI Data Security Standard; the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA); the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC; the Basel II Accord and others.
9. Although not considered email, instant messages should also be included as electronic items that can be stored in an email archival system. Within the course of daily activities business communication emails that are received can sometimes start off as instant messages that have been converted into email when the sender was no longer able to communicate with the recipient.
10. The implementation and execution of a good email archival system can save a company much valuable time and money when all contingencies have been taken into account and the planning has been done well.

Retention Policy Tag types available in Exchange Server 2010.

With email playing a critical role in every business’s operations, protecting it has become more important than ever. One way to do that is by archiving it. Unfortunately, some organizations may find the task daunting.

Why? Messages may be stored all over the place–in .PST files, on SharePoint sites, on backup tapes, with third-party providers and in employees’ personal email accounts.

“With the potential of up to 90 percent of your e-mail residing outside of your Exchange Server, it can be daunting to enforce data retention policies or locate relevant communications when compliance matters arise,” Microsoft observed in a White Paper titled “Addressing E-mail Archiving and Discovery with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.”

Another barrier to email archiving can be worker resistance. Some archiving solutions require both desktop and IT folks to change the ways they do things. Users may need to leave the comfort of their email applications to interact with archived messages. They may also need to learn new clients or applications to work in the new environment. Those things can discourage employee buy-in to the new system.

Not only can those accommodations to change disrupt established workflows of desktop workers, but it can affect an organization’s productivity. For instance, an archival system that doesn’t integrate seamlessly with an existing email setup can disable features in that existing system designed to increase productivity. For example, if the archives were set up outside Exchange, workers might lose the benefits of tools like Conversation View and the “anywhere access” capability of Microsoft’s Outlook Web App.

Similar challenges can confront an IT department. They may have to maintain new add-ons to email and Web apps to adjust to the archive scheme. What’s more, archiving could create a whole new infrastructure that must be made reliable and accessible to users. In addition, search methods that work with an existing system may not work with the new archival system. That can create quite a can of worms when compliance officers, legal departments and human resource people are breathing down an administrator’s neck for data to meet legal or regulatory demands.

Continue reading Dashing barriers to email archiving with Exchange 2010