What Exchange 2007 can't do

This week we rummage through the Reg Library for papers about email and archiving and stuff. We kick off with the corporate daddy, Exchange 2007.

Exchange 2007 risks and migration strategies

So we thought that running Microsoft Exchange was a pain for small businesses. According to this Dell white paper about Exchange 2007, it can be a pain for everyone.

Acknowledging that Exchange 2007 provides a solid platform for corporate email, Dell argues that Exchange is now "tasked to deliver capabilities that it has historically not included, such as site resiliency, business continuance, compliance support, remote access, anti-virus and anti-spam, and is legal discovery support. Yet during an outage or failure, Exchange 2007 provides minimal continuity functionality". Exchange 2007's high availability options are limited and expensive and the software does not include 'archiving capabilities adequate for most organisations. Also upgrading to Exchange 2007 can be very expensive, requiring upgrades to server hardware and software and increased licensing costs.

Dell offers five tips for evaluating Exchange 2007 risks and investments and finishes with a soft-shoe pitch for its own solution to augment Exchange, Dell Email Management Services (EMS). This paper is a good overview and a recommended read for anyone thinking of upgrading to Exchange 2007.

Cool vendors in [email] archiving

This Gartner research note zooms in on email archiving and selects four companies - Mimecast, RenewData, Permabit, and Sonian - for "cool" services addressing this market.

The analyst firm thinks small and mid-sized enterprises (which it seems to define as below 10,000 employees) should include archiving service providers in any archiving selection process, on cost and technology grounds. And it recommends that organisations pay particular attention to migrating email stored on old back up tapes. Service providers that provide specialist tools 'not only speed ingestion, but also provide defendable process that may be required if data is being restored for discovery purposes," Gartner says.

We are hooked on the idea of cloud-based email. But perhaps we should check our old emails before signing up for that data restore thing. ®