Has anyone used a different product for archiving email other than the built in feature in Notes? We are looking at all solutions possible and although the built in archiving feature works well it doesn’t do everything we need it to. We would like something that is seemless to the end user. We are a financial company so it is very likely that we could be asked for information that is two or three years old and sorting through tapes is not an option. We have found a couple of solutions ranging from Tivoli Storage Manager to DB2 Commonstore for Lotus Domino to hosted sites that archive a carbon copy of every single email sent and received. My question is, has anyone used any of these products or something similar and if so do you have any feedback on them for me? Any help would be appreciated.
Subject: You’re describing journaling, not archiving
R6 supports exactly what you describe; storing a copy of every message sent/received in another database – and it’s configurable, so that you can define which messages you want journalled, and which you don’t.
Subject: RE: You’re describing journaling, not archiving
Thanks for the heads up on journaling. I’ve heard about it but haven’t really looked into it. We do also want to get into archiving as we unfortunately have some pack rats in my company which have mail files in excess of 6 gb’s in size. I even have one over 20 gb’s. I looked in the documentation for journaling and found this line. “You can use Domino mail journaling in conjunction with third-party archiving programs to fulfill long-term storage needs.” Basically what the deal is, is that we want to setup all the archiving for the end user. The Notes documentation itself states that archiving is a manual process. We want to automate it and take that responsibility out of the hands of the end user. Leave it up to them and it’ll never get done. That’s why I was wondering if anybody has used the Tivoli Storage manager or any of the DB2 Commonstore for Lotus Domino. And if so what were their thoughts on the products.
“The Notes documentation itself states that archiving is a manual process. We want to automate it and take that responsibility out of the hands of the end user. Leave it up to them and it’ll never get done.”
When Joe Nelson said in his post that “You can even set policies with the Archiving section,” he meant that by using archive policy (new in R6), you can (remotely) define the archiving settings for your users. You can disallow them from changing the settings you define, and there’s a new feature in R6 archiving which allows (or forces) the Notes client to automatically archive on a schedule, so that you’re not relying on the user to do it manually.
What I believe is meant by the spiel about integrating 3rd-party tools is simply that you might wanna archive (a la backup) the ever-multiplying journal dbs to keep disk size down.
We are looking to archive mail files to an archive server, probably for the same reasons as Gail to reduce space on the current server and would like to do a bulk/mass archive operation, say over a weekend.
We are currently at Server 5.0.11 and looking to upgrade to 6.5.3 shortly. We do however have an iNotes server which is at 6.5.1, but I cannot see any way from the Admin client where we could select mail boxes for mass archiving on our 6.5.1 sever. We can select each Db (file) manually and select archive settings. Is there any way to select all for the same archive setting? I presume this kind of option would be available in 3rd party software, such as persussion software, but we don’t want to pay the extra costs for their solutions basically.
What are your specific needs (since you said it doesn’t do everything) because the Domino archiving is pretty specific. You can even set policies with the Archiving section.
Your posting references backing up emails sent which is not the same as a database archive. (which is what domino archiving is)
You could always write an agent on the mail.box which would copy the email to a repository for archival purposes. There is a lot you can do, but “everything” is a little broad and that expection from IBM is unattainable.