Many organisations are becoming increasingly accountable to industry bodies, regulators and government. For example, British American Racing, the Grand Prix racing team, has known rival teams to lose Grand Prix points having been unable to locate previous communications with the FIA seeking for approval on car modifications.

When thinking of email archiving, we need to focus on the content and not the format of the information. Electronic documents they may be, but they are considered admissible before the UK courts. It is simply no defense to cite technical difficulties when dealing with the legal issues that arise out of electronic mail use. e.g. I cannot produce said emails because my email server ran out of space and we had to delete them.

So am I just keeping the lawyers happy, or can I get some business benefit from this?
O.K. so as a company I need to retain emails for legal and compliancy reasons, but are there any business benefits to be gained or is it just to keep the lawyers happy?

email archiving can often be justified on business benefits alone, without the big stick from regulatory bodies. It can aid data recovery, knowledge management, user productivity and reduce the cost of storage and server capacity.

When considering email archiving Servo recommends Zantaz's market leading archiving product - EAS. EAS uses Microsoft infrastructure product to provide a non propriety email archive store. What this means to you as a business is the data always remains yours, unmodified, and always accessible today or in 20 years time. Secondly as a Microsoft Gold Partner, Servo chose EAS because it uses common Microsoft components that in many cases already exist on your network, such as SQL 2000 and Internet Information Server (IIS).

The following key benefits (that don't fall under compliancy requirements) can be gained from centralised email archiving:-

	Improved server recovery : By removing old emails from your Exchange information store, the Exchange server not only becomes faster, but is quicker to backup and therefore recover in the event of a site or server outage.
	Simple and quick mail recovery : Retrieving an archived email is just a double click on the email shortcut (often call stub.) But EAS also allows you to take a daily copy of all email without removing it from the Information Store. This provides the ability to recover users individual emails and removes the need of completing brick-level Exchange backups that are often unreliable and time consuming.
	Increased user productivity : Although the Icon has changed with a shortcut or stub, there are no other changes to the way users retrieve their emails. A simple double click opens the archive email within Outlook. Users' productivity will increase as they are no longer struggling against Exchange quotas and the search engine now includes the email attachment, not just a subject and content.
	Improved search across all your intellectual property : email has now become essential for good communications for any company. But how often is information held in email format, either particular procedures, customer details, trading information? EAS Search Engine provides easy and quick access to all archived email, ensuring corporate data is easily accessible and protected.

	Storage efficiencies: EAS provides both single instance storage and compression support, which together represent enormous disk space savings. Following detailed analysis of current and predicted email growth, many organisations find the disk savings alone can justify the purchase of EAS with a saving of up to 75% of the original capacity .	Following detailed analysis of current and predicted email growth, many organisations find the disk savings alone can justify the purchase of EAS with a saving of up to 75% of the original capacity.
	Tier Storage: EAS Exchange archiving store can sit on any compliant CIFS device, allowing emails to be migrated from high speed SCSI disk storage whilst in the Exchange Server, but then archived to low cost S-ATA NAS storage when archiving after 6 months and then to optical disks when emails become 3 years or more. The ability to migrate archived data is maintained by EAS Storage Retention Manager (StoRM), allowing information life cycle management as data value changes.
	PST elimination reduces management time and storage requirements : EAS offers organisations an advanced, intelligent archiving tool that will eliminate the need for .PST files and solve the problems they create. The key issue being that .PST files offer no single instance storage, consequently causing huge increases to storage requirements on network shares. This coupled with no central search and management facility and the unreliable nature of .PST files mean the elimination of .PST files from the network can greatly reduce management time and storage capacity.
	Easing Exchange migrations : Many organisations plan to migrate to Exchange 2003. Lack of support for Exchange 5.5 and 2000 in the future, along with the benefits of new functionality and manageability is making the move inevitable. To minimise the risks in making the transition, companies are spending a great deal of time and money on training, planning and testing; often consultancy and 3rd party software tools. One of the biggest practical problems to tackle is often the sheer volume of data most organisations have (including public folders, emails, tasks and calendars). By implementing EAS prior to the migration, the time to migrate the mailbox to Exchange 2003 is greatly reduced. For example, a leading financial software firm Marlborough Stirling was able to migrate from Exchange 5.5.to Exchange 2003 in a weekend.

	EAS for Ultimate PST File Management
	EAS Legal Compliance
	EAS Security, Backup and DR
	email Archiving - Easing Exchange Migrations

To download copies visit http://www.servo.co.uk/asp/events_eas_presentation.asp

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