Archive for the ‘Bob Spurzem’ Category

Mimosa Systems announced during the month of December 2009 that it collected its 1,000th customer.   Reaching 1,000 customers is a major milestone for any company and let me explain. 

When a new company begins, you can expect that its first ten customers basically received the product for ‘free’.  This is the customary practice to gain references. 

In my previous blog I exposed the naked truth about Exchange deleted items and how easy it is to destroy potential email records. 

Microsoft must have listened because the new version Exchange 2010 includes substantial improvements to the “dumpster” and deleted item behavior and closed the potential “leak” for eDiscovery.

The new Exchange 2010 dumpster is a complete new design.  Here is a link if you want the complete story.

To fully understand email discovery with Microsoft Exchange Server, you need to understand how the deleted item process works.  Here is a quick summary.

For Exchange 2007 and earlier versions, deleted email is moved to the deleted folder.  Once the deleted folder is emptied, the email moves into a system folder called the “dumpster”.  Email remains in the dumpster for a time determined by the Admin.  Typically this is 7 days.  After 7 days, the email is permanently removed from Exchange.

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?

Another Case of Lost Email

 It seems that every day our newspapers carry a story that involves lost email.  This case involves the Governor of North Caroline, his wife and leading officials at North Carolina State University. 

 From an IT perspective, the following actions and results from this case are very important to understand:

When talking about SharePoint recovery you need to understand that there are multiple levels of recovery. For example, bulk or coarse-grained recovery, that is quite different from item, or fine-grained recovery.

Bulk SharePoint recovery is quite common and is provided by the leading backup products, including Microsoft’s DPM and NTBackup. But, item level SharePoint restore is another matter to consider.

The benefits of email archiving are storage management, retention and legal discovery.

It is highly likely that you are already using an archiving solution for Microsoft Exchange and perhaps you also archive your network files shares. But, have you considered the benefits of archiving for SharePoint?

SharePoint is natural application to manage file sharing, collaboration and content sharing. With the introduction of MOSS 2007, its popularity has grown rapidly.

When considering an email archiving solution, be careful to consider the potential “clutter” it may cause to your existing Exchange environment.  There are three areas to be concerned with.  First, consider how the email archival solution impacts your Exchange Server. Does it use MAPI to remove old email?  If so, this job will consume major amounts of server CPU and memory resources.  Be careful how you deploy MAPI.  Second, consider the potential impact of Exchange journaling, if enabled for email discovery.  Journaling is well known CPU and memory hog and will it double disk I/O requirements.  If you are planning to enable journaling for email discovery, then you should plan on adding a new dedicated Exchange Server to support it.  Finally, consider the impact on the desktops of end users if agents or Outlook plug-ins are required for email archive access. 

Just about every week I see another customer who is asking for help with email archive migration.  It makes sense.  Many customers have been running email archival on their Exchange Server for over 5 years and it is time for a new solution.  

I have long felt that trying to archive a remote Microsoft Exchange Server was the wrong thing to do.  For certain, there are problems with capturing data over the wide area network, but there are even more serious problems when searching the archive or restoring a “stubbed” attachment file over the same slow connection.