Hi All,
I am after a fresh set of eyes for a problem that one of my clients is facing, and thought of no-where better to go than here :)
This client is actually a small branch of a major international organisation, as such, they do not have full control over their circumstances. The organisation is moving from Lotus to Exchange (YAY!) but this has changed the deployment scenario.
This branch will no longer have it's own mail server (as they did under Lotus) instead, I am assuming that they will be using RPC/HTTPS to connect to the server. This branch is ~25 people, were it my call, I would drop an exchange server in there.
ANYWAY, the actual problem is that there are going to be some extremely aggressive mailbox restrictions; from the virtual no-limit they have now, on their own server to the nightmarish limit of 100MB - count it, one hundred meg.
So, assuming that a dedicated exchange server here is not an option (feel free to comment about this though), what could be done?
My suggestion was to look at something like Enterprise Vault to rip it all off at a scheduled time (but the details of how this would work is not too clear) OR the horrible proposition of having AutoArchive PST files stored over the network. Bearing in mind that at the moment, this is the best solution we have - HELP!
Thanks in advance
-red
Enterprise Vault is expensive. I don't believe you can actually purchase the product and have the CDs to install yourself. I think it is either sold with expensive consultants to do the install or you have to go and do a course to do the installation. I know that one of my clients looked at it as part of an Exchange deployment and it would have increased the cost of the deployment by over double (which included my fee for the Exchange part).
Considering it is a financial company you would have hoped that they would consider the legal issues with document retention. One of my most frequent customer types is financial industry (insurance, loans etc) and with them we have to consider the document retention issues.
The most frequent deployment is GFI Mail Archiver with its own SQL server. That uses journaling and therefore allows a copy of the messages to be stored. GFI MA is popular with the users as well as they can get the items back "on demand" using a web interface. It takes a little while for them to get used to it, but once they have, I find the size of the mailboxes actually reduces as the users only keep live information in the mailbox. Once it has been dealt with it is deleted as they know there is a copy elsewhere that can be easily found and retrieved.
However that requires your own Exchange server to set the journaling. If the corporate bodies are not prepared to let you have your own server then your hands are tied.
In that case I would go with their requirements and limits, and then ensure that the user community know who to complain to. If you have a high concentration of directors then those cannot be ignored for very long unless corporate IT is very strong and has 100% backing of a very strong CEO.
Simon.