Our mail server has an average mail database size of 500MB. I have been tasked with investigating our Archiving alternatives. When I scan through the posts here on the forums, it seems that a lot of people use 3rd party applications to archive rather than using Domino / Notes. We even had a consultant recently recommended to us that we should write our own archiving system utilizing agents. I don’t know why he’d recommend that, since it’s already built into Notes/Domino, right?
I’ve read about Archive policies in the admin guide, so I know it is already available. I don’t have any first hand experience with it, so am I missing something?
We are a smaller shop, so we won’t be able to afford any of the larger 3rd party packages. Is there a “budget” archiving program available? We have about 500 users, and the larger packages cost about $10,000.
Absolutely nothing is wrong with Notes Archiving if you can live with two simple issue - A change to the end user interface that requires some training, and two places that will have to be searched if you are trying to locate a piece of mail and don’t know the time when you received or sent it.
Let’s talk about the first… When you implement Notes Archiving, a second mail database (Archive) is created for each mail user. I definitely recommend Server Archiving because this way the message is retained on your server where you can continue to get backups and can control the data. The end user has a link in their Navigation pane to their archived mail database. Their folder structure does stay intact in their archive but their is only a slight difference in the outline page for the two different databases. Deploying an archive solution based on Notes Archiving will involve communication/training for your end user population so they learn how to access their archive and so they start to realize when they are working from their archive and when they are in their primary mail database. Most of the Third Party solutions try and make the archiving retrieval experience as seemless to end users as possible. The create “stubbed” documents in your standard Lotus Notes views and folders that are basically links to the archived document, or when selected, re-stub the archived message. This way the end user experience is not changed.
The second major change is now your end users need to search two locations (primary mail database and archive database) when they attempt to find old messages. This can also cause end user confusion. Most of the Third Party tools also address this by leaving meta-data or the entire body of message in your primary mail database and only archiving attachments.
If you can get management approval of the above two changes, small organizations should consider using Notes Archiving. The cost savings for enterprise implementations can be justified by looking at the amount of storage savings you would get from implementing the Third Party tools. When you use Notes Archiving, you will not see any overall space reduction; you are simply moving the storage from your primary mail database into a different database. All of the Third Party tools use a Single Object storage paradigm so email sent to mutiple individuals is only saved once. This and their compression algorithyms typically save 50% - 33% of your disk expenditures for Domino storage.
Kevin’s reply is correct. My organisation is similar in size to your and we implemented Notes archiving when we migrated to Notes/Domino from ccMail. We held the archive files on a file server (but not a Domino server) and used quotas on mailfiles to force users to archive documents from their mailfiles from time to time. Users were trained on how to do this.
However, we faced two issues:
Notes archiving doesn’t help you much with the storage space issue. Yes, you’ve got the data off the live server but you still have to store it and back it up.
Compliance - if you have a requirement to be able to search across your email data assets (we do, we’re a government body) then it’s not easy to do this when you are looking at searching x hundred mailfiles + x hundred archive files.
We looked at Notes journaling but were advised to steer clear of it and in the end opted for a third party product called Legato Email Xtender. This journals all documents passing through the mail boxes on your servers to a central store. The store achieves good space economies by compression and single instance storage (you only hold one copy of emails and attachements sent to multiple recipients). The store is searchable via a client and users can locate their own emails and copy them back to their mailfiles. A second process called shortcutting manages the size of mailfiles by removing attachments (and messages if required) and replacing them with small shortcuts to the instance held in the EX archive. Another process on the Domino server intercepts when shortcut documents are read and retrieves the document. It works pretty well. You can also use the shortcut process to remove documents from mailfiles altogether and force users to use the search client to retrieve them from the EX archive.
It costs roughly £30 per mailbox with an annual support cost of £13 per mailbox.
ReduceMail Pro (http://reducemail.com ) goes a step further than EMC while keeping it simple (only one technology): all mail is accessed directly from the mailfile (no need to copy anything back, just double-click on the message) and the user does not need to exit their mailfile to search archived mail. It also conveniently divides the mail into a small, quickly changing mailfile and a large blob-like archive that needs minimal maintenance and only needs to be backed up whenever the archiving process runs (once a month is recommended).