The fast-moving E-MAIL MANAGEMENT MARKET
CEO of Mimosa Systems, which more than tripled its customer base in the past year to approximately 140. The company uniquely provides a live (real-time) content archiving solution to manage unstructured and semi-structured information, including e-mail, documents and other new data types for purposes of legal discovery, data recovery, disaster recovery and storage management.
Mimosa’s solution unifies archiving, data protection and disaster recovery. It is primarily focused on the Microsoft market, offering its NearPoint solution to enhance the use of Microsoft Exchange. Ravi says, “Our customers can make higher-quality decisions with fingertip access to all related content they are looking for, not just a standalone silo or two.”
Enterprise content management (ECM) giant Open Text acquired another leading ECM firm, Hummingbird, last year. Open Text offers its LiveLink ECM product with a suite of modules for e-mail archiving, management and monitoring for either MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. The new FRCP have been a key factor in the growth in e-mail management and archiving installations, says Open Text Executive VP Bill Forquer, who sees some advantages in the new rules.
“Certainly, there are new risks and new challenges, but the amendments add clarity,” Forquer says. “They create a sense of urgency and a mandate for companies to have good information management practices in their organizations.”
Open Text and partner TCDI (tcdi.com), a market leader in electronic discovery and litigation support, recently introduced a combined software solution called Livelink ECM—Litigation Management, which helps companies reduce e-discovery costs and resource demands by providing a unified system that manages discovery in-house as litigation arises. It also helps to enforce policies that set out which content is kept or destroyed in accordance with regulations and the company’s best interests.
Sherpa Software concentrates on e-mail management, search and archiving to support governance policy enforcement and compliance efforts. Sherpa has about 400 organizations using its Mail Attender, Archive Attender and Discovery Attender suite of products, according to Sherpa VP Kevin Ogrodnik.
Mail Attender Enterprise is used to manage MS Exchange mailboxes, public folders and PST files on servers and desktops from one central console. It also helps in policy administration, content management, enforcing records retention rules and searches. Archive Attender automatically archives messages and attachments to an external storage device from Exchange mailboxes, the journal mailbox and PST files to support compliance requirements and storage management needs. The e-discovery process is facilitated with Discovery Attender, which automates search, viewing and retrieval of e-mail and other types of electronic information. It performs real-time content searches that quickly locate information in Exchange mailboxes, PST files and common storage files.
Although its competitors would claim that it uses older technologies that can be limiting, Symantec is the market leader in the EMM space, with almost 5,000 user organizations and 8 million mailboxes installed, according to Art Gilliland, senior director of product marketing. “Several of our largest users have over 100,000 mailboxes implemented,” he says.
Symantec’s Enterprise Vault product was acquired in the 2005 Veritas acquisition, on the heels of Veritas’ acquisition of U.K.-based KVS, which developed the successful Enterprise Vault product. Enterprise Vault 7.0 provides an intelligent archiving platform that stores, manages and enables discovery of corporate data from e-mail systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and content management and collaboration systems. Enterprise Vault uses intelligent classification engines and automatic mailbox management, which free users from quota frustrations without compromising MS Exchange performance and reliability. It also assists in PST file backup, security and storage management.
Zantaz is among the market leaders in EMM, e-mail archiving and electronic data discovery (EDD). As a corporation, it concentrates on content archiving and electronic discovery. Products include the Digital Safe product family for compliance archiving and the export of high volumes of data into its EDD solution; EAS (Enterprise Archive Solution) for EMM, message retention and e-discovery export; First Archive, a hosted or onsite solution for mailbox management, retention and litigation readiness; First Discovery, an EDD solution; and Introspect for online review, document production management and litigation readiness. The company also offers a data restoration service.
ZipLip, another leader in the EMM market, offers solutions for e-mail archiving, compliance, secure e-mail and secure file collaboration. It calls its platform “future-proof,” because it uses the newest GRID architecture. ZipLip’s Unified E-mail Archival Suite (ZL UA) is Web-based server software for e-mail archiving and management for MS Exchange, Lotus Notes and most other e-mail systems.
Features of ZL UA include: Attorney-Client Privilege Flagging & Privilege Logs, which ensure that sensitive exchanges between employees and legal counsel will not be turned over to external auditors; Disclaimer-Auto Exclusion, which prevents language in disclaimers from being flagged if it contains sensitive wording such as “stock”; One-click Search
& Export to reduce review and audit process times; Pre-Review & Gateway Capture, for outbound content compliance (OCC), stopping violations before they take place; Lexicon-based Mail Auto-Categorization, which categorizes e-mails according to topic, genre or category; Message Attachment Stubbing, Retention Policy Management, Archive Compression, Advanced Search and several other features.
ZyLab began with roots in the full-text search market, which it leverages in its EMM solution (as part of its ECM platform). ZyLab’s Information Access Platform has an XML-based underpinning and can scale larger and search better and faster than EMM solutions that use a database architecture, according to the ZyLab CEO Johannes Scholtes. “EMM solutions using a relational database on the back end are going to be by definition slow in the search process, because of the limitations of the architecture,” he says.
ZyLab’s Correspondence Management module allows MS Outlook users to register all incoming and outgoing documents (including e-mail, mail and faxes), and is connected to ZyIMAGE, its XML-based Information Access Platform. E-mail that is received or sent can be registered automatically by using the Archiving Plug-in for Outlook. The archive option in the plug-in sends the e-mail to the archive and enters a registration in the Correspondence Management Module. ZyLab also offers other products integrated to its Information Access Platform including its Text Mining Suite, Bates Stamping (for legal documents), and XML wrapper and Audit Trail monitor.
The EMM market is certainly a moving target with several types of technology approaches. Clearly, users need a solution with the governance and legal pressures they face. Making the best choice could not only save headaches, but also millions of dollars in legal fees, fines and potential legal settlements.