Curator’s Note: An Exchange MVP is a Microsoft-blessed expert on Microsoft’s Exchange email system. Here David Sengupta recounts the development of the MVP concept, and his personal experiences as an early Exchange MVP–David Ferris Having been an Exchange Most Valuable Professional (“MVP”) for 14 years now–since 1997-I’ve been asked to jot down a few thoughts... read more »
Curator’s Note: Tony Redmond is Author of “ALL-IN-1: A Technical Odyssey” and “ALL-IN-1 V3.0: Managing and Programming” and for many years has been a highly regarded expert on Microsoft Exchange Server. — David Sengupta My first exposure to enterprise email was in the form of CP/OSS in 1982. CP/OSS stood for the “Charlotte Package of... read more »
Curator’s note: We’re delighted to receive this piece from Ralph Ehlers, which is the museum’s first piece by an IT implementer. We hope to have many more contributions from IT professionals. Ralph was in charge of the email system at ABB and Roche, two of Europe’s largest businesses. He was also chairman of the user... read more »
Editor’s Note: Enterprise Vault is the leading email archiving product. The museum is delighted to have this posting from Nigel Dutt, one of the product’s founders. Nigel is also a good example of how highly skilled engineers can become successful entrepreneurs. And along the way, they motivate the rest of us.–David Ferris Conception The genesis... read more »
Wikipedia, a generally reliable source, reckons that the first SMS text message was sent in 1992. This sounds about right. More specifically, Wikipedia says: SMS messaging was first used in December 1992, when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group, used a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the... read more »
How should you build a strategy to address corporate archiving? Here’s a task checklist I propose, to ensure you have all bases covered. Bob Spurzem Setting Archiving Strategy: A Nine-Step Plan Industry. What industry is your organization in and what regulations ( Fed, state, local) have impact? Here you can rely on inside experts (legal or... read more »
We’ve just defined our sponsorship program. It’s a great opportunity to gain valuable publicity that underscores leadership in human communications technologies. Sponsorship is available to: Firms that offer digital communications products and services Businesses and IT groups with an interest in these technologies Academic institutions/research teams with a role in the future of digital communications... read more »
Ignore non-electronic spam, such as junk postal mail. We believe the first computer-based spam was sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketeer at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978. It described a sales presentation promoting Digital’s DEC 2020 computer, and was sent to around 400 people on the ARPAnet, precursor of the internet. The actual message is... read more »
Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC’s) ALL-IN-1 and IBM’s PROFS were the leading email packages during the 1980s and 1990s; here’s a quick summary of the former. We welcome further details on ALL–IN-1′s history–please post as a response to this blog, or feel free to propose a new bulletin or article if you want to write at... read more »
How and when did emoticons evolve? According to Microsoft’s Mike Smith, the first emoticon appeared in 1982. The smiley “:-)” and its opposite “:-(” were invented by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon, who posted it to a bulletin board. Here’s what Scott said at the time. 19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :–) From: Scott E... read more »
Google+ is very impressive. I reckon Facebook is toast: The integration with other Google services will be a key strategic advantage, that Facebook will not be able to match. The Circles approach to privacy control is neat and puts control of sharing with the sender in a clean and easy to manage way. Widely aired... read more »
Insert wiggle room when moving from on-premise Exchange Server to Microsoft’s hosted Exchange Office 365, because the unexpected can occur. At the last TechEd, an Exchange admin described how her company had recently moved 300 mailboxes to Office 365, with the full support of Microsoft. She was told everything would go smoothly. However: There were... read more »
Exchange 2010 lets users import their PST data to their primary mailbox or their archiving mailbox. The PST import feature is run from the Exchange Management Console and it can also be scripted using PowerShell. The many problems of PST files are well understood. However, uploading them back into Exchange isn’t always the right choice:... read more »
Email archiving is a worldwide application for many organizations. The result is the need for double byte support for languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Before you make Chinese and Japanese a must-have requirement, consider that: Chinese and Japanese (and other tokenized/symbol-based languages) are very difficult to index and search properly. After English, your next... read more »
With Exchange 2010, Microsoft added a new feature for legal holds that was sorely missing in previous versions of Exchange. It makes Exchange more manageable for legal discovery. Microsoft took an unusual tack when designing the legal hold. It chose to leverage the Deleted Items folder. For Exchange 2010 the Deleted Items folder and its underlying... read more »
The US Federal Courts recently ruled that email held by an ISP Server is subject to the protections of the Fourth Amendment. This is an important ruling that clearly puts email on the same level as letters and phone calls as a viable and well accepted form of personal communication. The role of the Fourth... read more »
A major reason to use SharePoint is that it helps users share files. However, cloud-based file sharing is going mainstream. To illustrate, consider two offerings with different approaches. They’re both attractive alternatives to SharePoint, if your motivation is file sharing: DropBox implemented file sharing cleverly by designing its interface to integrate seamlessly with the Microsoft... read more »
Leading suppliers of hosted email archiving are telling customers that for a flat monthly fee, their users have “unlimited storage.” This is too good to be true. Read the fine print and you are sure to find an “acceptable use clause” that protects the vendor against excessive use. This makes perfect sense. There are hard... read more »
In the 1990′s, 10MB was considered a standard mailbox size. This let you send 10-20 emails per day and save email for months. Today 100-150 new emails per day is common–a 10MB mailbox fills in a day at this rate. The total use of email-like communication is probably still increasing. However, pure email–as measured both... read more »
Exchange 2010 Storage Planning When moving to Exchange 2010, there are two key questions regarding storage. How large do you want to make the new mailboxes? Exchange 2010 can manage 10 GB mailboxes, as a result of major disk I/O improvements. Mailbox size directly impacts system recovery time, so you may still want to be... read more »
Users commonly maintain at least two PST files, and sometimes as many as five or more PST files. Managing them is an ongoing problem for users–for example, updating them daily, fixing corruptions, or reinstating lost PSTs. The problem is worsening. Microsoft Exchange 2010 delivers a new archiving mailbox that can hold old email, including PST... read more »
In a move widely expected due to pressure from its shareholders, Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) recently divested its digital archiving business to Autonomy for 380M. Iron Mountain projected revenues are 140M which puts the acquisition price at a multiple of approximately 2.7 times revenue. Autonomy gets Iron Mountain’s archiving, online backup, and e-discovery businesses. This includes... read more »
Symantec is buying e-discovery vendor Clearwell Systems for $390M, in a deal expected to close in September. With Clearwell revenues over $50M, Symantec is expected to have paid 7x trailing twelve months revenue (TTR) for this purchase, which is quite an achievement for Clearwell. This deal makes a lot of sense for Symantec, which has... read more »
An Open Letter to Vendors Analyst giant Gartner is defending itself against an interesting lawsuit (see links at the end of this message). In a nutshell, ZL Technologies, an archiving firm, asserts that its low ranking on the Magic Quadrant is a result of never spending money with Gartner. Gartner denies that its reviews are... read more »
We hear strong rumors to the effect that Symantec is about to acquire LiveOffice. We believe them to be reliable. This wouldn’t be surprising: Symantec is building its cloud-based offering It has a strong on-premises archiving product (Enterprise Vault) LiveOffice provides a strong cloud-based archiving offering Nick Mehta, CEO, was in charge of Symantec’s Enterprise... read more »
A new "Here You Have" virus is wreaking havoc on email servers around the globe. Early reports suggest users in at least 90% of all government departments and the majority of companies have been hit. It’s too early to understand the full scale of the damages, but if playing with Google’s logo can cause millions... read more »
Google quietly announced the end of Google Wave on its blog earlier this week. The reason given was that adoption rates were too low. Just over a year ago we wrote about Google’s big splash around Google Wave. One of the things we pointed out at the time was Wave’s suitability for third-party developers to... read more »
Research in Motion (RIM) has been in the news a lot lately because countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others plan to ban BlackBerry services from their citizens. Specifically Messenger, Web browsing, and email are deemed a security threat by the governments of these countries, for various reasons. In the majority of cases, governments... read more »
Microsoft Outlook can be used to access email using the Internet Standard IMAP protocols, and the older POP protocol. In Outlook 2010, Microsoft made a number of improvements to IMAP support. Both the descriptions of what has been done and the extensive comment in this blog are interesting. Broadly, IMAP in Outlook 2010 works reasonably,... read more »
We’ve just been briefed by Clearswift‘s new COO, Andrew Wyatt. It’s always a pleasure to hear from this firm. We have known them since 1995, when Content Technologies (the company that originally developed MIMEsweeper) became a client. The technology has taken a lot of battering over the last 10 years. First it was bought out... read more »
Apple’s recent update to the iPhone operating system (iOS 4) contains some updates to the IMAP (the Internet Standard Internet Message Access Protocol) support. Details here. The RFCs now supported are: COMPRESS (4978) ESEARCH (4731) CHUNKING (3030) 8BITMIME (1652) ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES (3463) BINARYMIME (3030) CONDSTORE (4551) These standards are also supported by Apple’s Mobile Me email... read more »
We ran into the Red Gate team at the recent Microsoft TechEd show and learned about the new release of Exchange Server Archiver V3. The major new change with version 3 is support for Exchange 2010. In addition, version 3 provides improved performance and a new simplified storage architecture. Exchange Server Archive V3 continues its... read more »
On June 22, 2010, Unify announced it would merge with Daegis, an e-discovery review firm. Here are some thoughts on the transaction: According to Kurt Jensen, CEO of Daegis, revenues for calendar years 2007/8/9 were approximately $16M, $21M, and $23M, respectively, with profitability consistently between 25% and 35%. Unify paid some $37M for Daegis. Of... read more »
Unify is a database tools company that acquired archiving software vendor AXS-One in June 2009. On June 22, 2010, Unify announced it would merge with Daegis, an e-discovery review firm: Daegis has a matter review SaaS that culls down a corpus of ESI. It also provides manpower to plan the initial collection process and the... read more »
Recently at the Gartner IT Infrastructure Expo in Orlando, I witnessed a seminal change in IT thinking. Nine out of 10 IT decision makers I spoke with told me that they have active general-purpose file archiving projects. Hitherto, email archiving has been at the fore, with file archiving always on the back burner. The general... read more »