E-mail archiving and management: From niche to core component

Captaris
Captaris Exchange Archive Link for Captaris Alchemy (formerly IMR's Alchemy MailStore) solves the problems of e-mail regulatory compliance and records retention by capturing e-mail from Exchange or Outlook in a secure repository, and storing and managing it as a record. Exchange Archive Link can be used for Exchange by itself or combined with Outlook. It provides a rules engine that allows administrators to create rules enforcing e-mail archive policies, and rules are displayed in "plain English." It performs real-time archiving and indexing and allows compliance officers to identify possible e-mail policy violations the same day they occur.

Additionally, every archived e-mail is fully indexed in the event of an urgent legal discovery request, eliminating the need for costly e-mail recovery services. It also features integration with records management by archiving e-mails into the same repository system that can be controlled by the Alchemy Records Manager. It supports archiving onto several media options including CD-R, DVD-R, UDO and Sony ProData Disc.

Computer Associates (iLumin)
Computer Associates (CA) acquired iLumin in October 2005 and renamed its suite of products CA Message Manager. In the past, iLumin has focused on the financial services market (six of the seven largest banks in the world are customers), but now is concentrating more on energy and healthcare--also heavily regulated marketplaces. CA reports that Message Manager has more than 300 customers, including Liberty Healthcare and Seattle Northwest Securities. CA Message Manager manages over 2 million mailboxes, 110 million messages a day and more than 40 billion messages a year. Many customers manage over 30,000 mailboxes with the product.

In the past year, the product has been internationalized, adding French, German and Spanish versions, and plans are in the works to address Message Manager's key weakness: a lack of records management capabilities. The new capabilities will also include a federated search capability.

According to Mike Gundling, VP of product management, "Our development resources have doubled with the acquisition, so we're expanding our product breadth and market reach. Customers will be able to implement a single file plan with integrated policy management, and implement globally."

CA Message Manager offers a broad range of support for e-mail server platforms, (and offers in-house as well as a hosted solution), supporting MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise and other popular e-mail services, such as Bloomberg and Oracle Collaboration Suite.

EMC
EMC has about 1,500 e-mail archiving customers and thousands of other customers using file system archiving, SAP archiving and various application types. Some customers include Goldman Sachs, Archipelago (just acquired by the New York Stock Exchange), Deutsche Bank, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Nationwide Insurance. EMC's E-mailXtender product family (based on its acquisition of Legato) delivers archiving and supervision of e-mail and instant messages and supports most major messaging environments, including Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.

The product family consists of E-mailXtender Archive Edition, which improves server performance by migrating e-mail messages and attachments into a centralized message archive; E-mailXtender, which performs the same functions but also manages e-mail as a record; and E-mailXaminer, which monitors and supervises e-mail content to ensure organizations adhere to corporate e-mail policy and achieve regulatory compliance.

EMC supports all data and content types from e-mail; IM; SharePoint; file systems; business applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and others; as well as other types of content such as images, reports and rich media. Many other vendors are generally focused on one application or content type.

FileNet
FileNet E-mail Manager integrates with both Exchange and Lotus Notes mail server platforms and integrates with FileNet's ECM platform, FileNet P8. E-mail Manager is a rules-based e-mail management solution that simplifies and automates the capture of e-mail messages as business records. The integration of FileNet E-mail Manager and FileNet Records Manager allows the automatic declaration of e-mail as records during the capture process, regardless of whether automatic or manual capture is used. Integrating e-mail and records management automates the process of declaring e-mail content as business records and manages the entire e-mail life cycle in compliance with records management policies.

E-mail Manager takes a content-centric approach to e-mail management, capturing related correspondence that can be linked to underlying applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The event-driven processing feature automatically launches business processes in response to incoming e-mails. In addition, correspondence can be automatically linked to customer records within a CRM or ERP system, providing real-time access to customer-related e-mail content.

Fortiva
Fortiva's e-mail archiving solution supports MS Exchange only and is tightly integrated with it. Fortiva's Suite runs as a hosted solution at its data center, and after less than a year of operation the company has sold more than 20,000 seats to nearly 40 customers. Fortiva's approach significantly reduces the burden on e-mail servers by securely storing a copy of all e-mail on the Fortiva Network. With Fortiva in place, mailbox size limits can be enforced, while giving users access to all data, even after it's deleted from the server.

But what about security and confidentiality? "We guarantee that we can never see our customers' e-mail. It's encrypted before it is transmitted to us," says CEO Paul Chen.

The Fortiva suite consists of Fortiva Policy, where users design, edit and maintain electronic messaging policy, including retention, enforcement and supervision rules; Fortiva ArchiveSecurely, which stores electronic messages for an unlimited amount of time and allows users to search and retrieve in real time; Fortiva Discovery, which performs real-time advanced searches across the message header, message body and content of more than 250 types of attachments; Fortiva Supervision, which creates a supervision process for selecting and reviewing the content of electronic messages for acceptable use of e-mail; and Fortiva Reports, which provides detailed reports to properly assess e-mail patterns and behavior.

Hummingbird
Hummingbird Enterprise captures, manages and preserves corporate e-mail according to organization policies, storing it alongside other business-relevant content in a single, unified repository. Supporting e-mail and attachments in tandem with records classification and management processes, Hummingbird Enterprise enables knowledge professionals to access ECM resources from directly within native e-mail interfaces.

In 2000, Hummingbird first marketed a unified repository for managing documents and records throughout their life cycle, a capability that plays into current trends. Hummingbird Enterprise focuses more on the front-end e-mail management and collaboration functions, and then partners with companies like EMC and Symantec for back-end archival functionality.