Archive for September, 2009

This is a question that has been asked many times.During an upgrade to Exchange 2007 or even Exchange 2010 in the future, all mailbox data within the legacy Exchange 2003 Server would typically be migrated into the new Exchange 2007 Server. Since a migration will copy old, infrequently accessed, or fixed/static email data, it may be a time consuming and inefficient process depending on the volume of inactive data. The excessive bulk of this data will also impact performance and capacity on the new servers, and increase backup and restore times.

Today I ran across a report from AIIM which says that 18% of the companies that have SharePoint deployed within their organizations do not know if sensitive documents are actually stored within their SharePoint farm. Many people follow widely published SharePoint governance plans however now that SharePoint is getting more traction and more attention these plans are starting to fall short of preventing some issues.

Rafael Ruffolo from Computer Word Canada wrote an interesting article titled “Basic eDiscovery Practices are being avoided”. In it Rafael stated:

“Even more troubling for Miles is that many fundamental e-discovery best practices are largely being avoided across these IT shops. About 55 per cent of survey respondents indicated that they set no guidance on dealing with important e-mails as records, and another 38 per cent said they conduct little or no enforcement of their management policies”.

Most organizations do see the benefit of SharePoint archiving to not only keep the excessive growth of their SharePoint farm in line, but also to ensure that only relevant data remains in the system. What many SharePoint archiving offerings from other 3rd parties do is what many people expect archiving to do. You take the blob out of the SharePoint content database and replace it pretty much with a stub, which sounds like a very plausible and logical thing to do.

Employees at Boston’s City Hall are in big trouble with email according to this recent article in the Boston Globe. It seems the common practice is to delete email daily to reduce mailbox load. At least this is the reason provided by one employee. But who forgot about public record laws which require all city email to be saved for two years?

During a live customer demo presentation recently, I asked the customer, “what are the key problem with Exchange you are trying to solve?”.   His answer surprised me.  He said, “Exchange is like a two-headed beast.  First, Exchange mailboxes are growing out of control and it is impacting overall performance and backup times severely.  Second, requests to search old email are not coming once a week.  It takes me a full day each time to respond to a search request.”

Premier blog en français chez Mimosa Systems!

Il  s’adresse à toutes personnes  intéressées par l’archivage électronique, sous l’œil attentif des francophones de Mimosa Systems : même si la langue anglaise est de loin la plus pratiquée dans notre entreprise basée en Californie, suivie surement par le marathi avec son centre de développement et de support à Pune, le nombre de francophones n’est presque pas négligeable : Naomi, Tibi, Donald, Christophe, Stephane, Ravi et tous les autres -n’hésitez pas à vous manifester –  , je compte sur vous pour faire vivre ce blog.

The last few weeks I’ve been reading SharePoint governance plans and most plans really go into fine details who needs to be on board to get SharePoint successfully deployed in an organization. Microsoft released a paper recently that gives you a real detailed Internet SharePoint Governance Plan. Stakeholders like the SharePoint owner, server administrator, solution architect, designer and developer are all covered, but everywhere were I look at these plans I’m missing very important stakeholders in the decision processes. Where are HR and the General Legal Counsel?