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Review: C2C ArchiveOne Express

Alan Stevens — 2009-11-06T09:00:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 09:00:00

An affordable and easy-to-use message archiving tool

Developers often add 'Express' to product names to signal that that they're cut-down or simpler versions of an enterprise application, repackaged for the small business. This is exactly what C2C has done with its popular Exchange archiving add-on, now available in a fat-free Express edition aimed at companies looking for basic message archiving for up to 200 users.

Based on the same core technology as enterprise versions of ArchiveOne, the new ArchiveOne Express includes the ability to archive public folders, plus local message stores (PST) discovery and management. However, according to C2C, it's a lot quicker to install and much easier to manage.

Like other versions it can also be used with any release of Exchange from 2000 upwards. It took no more than 15 to 20 minutes to install using one of our test servers, in our case, running Exchange Server 2003.

Installation

The speedy install was largely down to wizards that stepped us through the installation and subsequent configuration required to get started. However, another factor is that, instead of having to set up complex archiving rules, you start out with a simple choice between archiving based on message age and mailbox size, an approach that really does reduce the amount of work involved. We tried both in turn; from the MMC plug-in used to manage ArchiveOne Express, we simply selected the mailboxes we wanted to manage and scheduled the pre-set archiving jobs created during the setup process.

For the most part we took the offered defaults, which further speeded up our deployment. Plus, unlike a lot of other archiving programs, there's no need for a supporting database, as any accessible network storage can be used to hold the archived files, including network-attached storage shares.

On the downside it did take a while to get to grips with some of the terminology, and the accompanying documentation didn't explain everything as clearly as we would have liked, particularly how to go about including users' PSTs in the archiving process. A separate agent needs to be run on each client to facilitate this, but it took a lot of time, and trial runs, to work out exactly how to get it working.

Zero training?

Another claim is that ArchiveOne Express users need "zero training". This is because you carry on accessing mail in the normal manner using either Outlook, Outlook Web Access or a mobile client such as a BlackBerry or Apple's iPhone. More than that, archived messages are still listed but, instead of the normal content, you get a link to the archived message in the associated repository. Click on this and the content is displayed via a browser and, if wanted, can be taken out of the archive and moved back to the normal Exchange mailbox store.

New folders are also added to the Exchange mailbox to enable users to browse and search the archives for information and, on the whole, we found it all pretty self-explanatory. Whether or not that justifies the "zero training" claim is debateable and, in our opinion, users are likely to need some hand-holding, at least to begin with.

Exchange administrators, on the other hand, should have little difficulty working out how to use the software and, having got the basic archiving to work, we found a lot more that we could do with ArchiveOne Express. For example, it's possible to specify more detailed criteria when deciding what to archive, including who messages are from or addressed to, and whether or not there are any attachments, their size and so on.

Public folders

Archiving messages in public folders is another option, together with the ability to use ArchiveOne Express for regulatory compliance with legal hold and so-called Bates stamping (where each message gets a unique date/time stamp) built-in. However, you need to be using the Exchange journaling option to automatically keep copies of all incoming and outgoing messages, and fully exploit these capabilities.

Another benefit with ArchiveOne Express is that, as with other archiving tools, the C2C software can significantly enhance Exchange server performance. It can also help to reduce storage costs as older messages get moved out to cheaper disks. Backup is still required and isn't included in the product, although C2C does offer a hosted disaster recovery service called ArchiveOne CloudDR that can be used to protect archive repositories against local outages, data corruption and the like.

We were very impressed with ArchiveOne Express, which is priced to appeal to small business buyers, but still employs proven enterprise technology to archive messages in a straightforward and seamless manner. It's quick to install, lives up to most of the claims made for its ease of use, and represents good value for anyone looking for basic yet robust Exchange archiving.

Review: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Alan Stevens — 2009-09-11T12:10:00.000Z

Alan Stevens, V3.co.uk, Friday 11 September 2009 at 12:10:00

The latest release offers some much needed enhancements

A feature-complete release candidate of Exchange Server 2010 became publicly available at the end of August, making it a good time to look at what the new version of Microsoft's market leading messaging and collaboration server has to offer. Which turns out to be quite a lot, although it's not all good news.

There are some pretty obvious enhancements, with the relentless march towards a common user experience, regardless of platform, continuing apace. Web and mobile clients have both been tweaked to match what Outlook has to offer so, for example, web users now get just one page of messages, and can share calendars and contacts and access integrated IM facilities. We were also able run the full web interface from a lot more browsers, including Firefox and Safari. This is a big step up from previous releases, even Exchange 2007, where you had to make do with a cut-down client in anything other than Internet Explorer.

Threaded conversations

Another new feature which everyone will like is a threaded 'conversation' view. Available in the forthcoming Outlook 2010 client and Outlook Web Access, this does away with the need to manually wade through long lists of messages in order to follow an email exchange. Bulletin boards have always had this, and it's available in several Exchange alternatives, including Lotus Notes and Google Mail, making it even more amazing that it's taken so long to add it to the Microsoft product.

Still, the conversation view is there now, and we also liked the ability to see whether we had replied to a message without having to wait for checks to be made. Likewise we liked the new MailTips, which warn when you're about to make a range of common emailing errors. We were a little sceptical to start with, but it doesn't take long to appreciate these pop-up warnings. This is especially true when you've accidentally clicked 'Reply All' on an email with a long recipient list, or spent ages composing a message to someone only to get an automatic reply telling you they're on holiday.

Of course, in order to support these and other new features you have to first install or upgrade your Exchange servers, and that's not always been easy in the past. The good news is that it's not as big an upgrade as Exchange 2007, as only a minor tweaking of the role-based architecture was introduced in that release. However, we still found it quite daunting and it took us several hours to get a single test server up and running.

As with Exchange 2007 you need a 64-bit host and, similarly, you can't upgrade from an existing server straight to 2010. Not that that was a problem for us starting from scratch, but it could be a major irritant for upgraders who will need to deploy one or more new servers, and then migrate users and mailboxes across.

On the plus side, if you start running the release candidate now, an in-place upgrade to the final code will be possible when the full version is released later in the year. You can also integrate Exchange 2010 into an existing 2003 or 2007 setup, although the recently released SP2 update is needed for co-existence with Exchange 2007.

Among the other hurdles we had to overcome was the need to have Windows Server 2008 with SP2 installed, as earlier versions of Windows Server can't be used. Version 2.0 of Windows PowerShell is another pre-requisite, although this is now included in the latest Windows Server 2008 R2 implementation. Even then it took some time getting through the pre-install checks before the setup proper could start, and a couple more hours after that before we could finally start using the product.

Split personality

As with the Exchange 2007 upgrade, a lot of technical expertise is required, which won't worry big corporate customers but could be an issue for smaller companies. Fortunately Exchange 2010 has been designed from the ground up with a dual personality to be deployed either in-house or as a hosted service. More than that, Microsoft is positively encouraging small companies to go down the software-as-a-service route, with no word, for example, as to whether or not a Small Business Server with Exchange 2010 will be made available.

If you do configure a server of your own there are several other enhancements to look forward to, including reduced I/O demands over and above the improvements delivered in the 2007 product. What really impressed us, however, was the ease and speed with which we could move mailboxes around. This common management task used to take ages, but can be done in seconds with 2010.

Built-in archiving

Availability and failover features are also beefed up, and you get built-in archiving tools, another long overdue addition. Surprisingly, Microsoft is the first vendor to provide this option in a mainstream messaging server and, while the new archiving options are far from comprehensive, they're a good start and are likely to give add-on developers something to worry about.

Our overall experience with Exchange 2010 was good, and we believe that customers will think the same. Whether or not it's enough to convince those put off upgrading last time round by the amount of effort involved remains to be seen. Not much has changed there, but there's a lot to like otherwise and that could just tip the balance.