It’s not easy to work collaboratively on PowerPoint documents. Basic tools such as change tracking and versioning are not built in. SharedDoc has just announced a solution: Users can post comments and discuss presentations. One person retains control and makes edits. Comments are made via a Web browser. The tool is mainly aimed at cases... read more »
Google announced the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool as part of its ongoing battle to woo Exchange customers over to Google Apps. The tool provides a simple mechanism for small companies wishing to take the leap to Google Apps. Users can upload a comma separated values (.csv) file to Google with the names... read more »
We recently learned about ComArchive. It’s a very simple and attractive approach to archiving. Functionality: Works with Exchange/Outlook 2003/7/10. Archive maintained on-premises or in the cloud. Has Outlook plugin–to access the archive, users click on Archive button. Browser access also available. Everything is archived and users can’t delete material from the archive. So when users... read more »
In December, we published a bulletin titled Cost of Exchange 2010 Storage Not An Issue. This said that storage is now so cheap that Exchange 2010 users needn’t worry about storage costs. We still subscribe largely to that view. However, it’s not true for organizations that are committed to storage area networks (SANs). Here is... read more »
Hosted Exchange vendor Intermedia has added integrated telephony to its offering. The focus is on sales to SMBs, up to around 1,000 seats. Thoughts: Hitherto the offering has consisted of email, IM, fax, and SharePoint. This is the first time we’ve heard of a hosted email offering providing integrated telephony. Telephony doesn’t require high bandwidth.... read more »
This is the first of a series of bulletins on important features of Exchange archiving, namely: single instance storage, retention management, PST management, mailbox size, multi-mailbox search, and item-level restore. Beginning with Exchange 2010, many small and medium-size organizations may find that sufficient features are included, so that third-party archiving tools are no longer necessary.... read more »
Hosted archiving vendor LiveOffice is expanding its supported data types. Hitherto, it has mainly archived Exchange email, with some instant messaging. As of March 2, LiveOffice is also archiving SharePoint teamspaces and Web site pages. The Web site support implies support for social networking Web sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Costs: SharePoint archiving:... read more »
Last Friday (February 19), the chattering classes were gossiping about how cloud archiving vendor Smarsh had its Web site and phone lines down. Had the company suddenly gone down the toilet? Everything was in fact OK. The company’s Ken Anderson told us: We had technical issues this morning that created some intermittent access to some... read more »
Iron Mountain announced it has acquired Mimosa Systems. This puts an end to over a year of rumors concerning Mimosa’s acquisition discussions with a number of possible suitors. Iron Mountain has a vested interest in building bridges between customer on-premise deployments and its Digital Archive, and the company has been building partnerships with numerous on-premise... read more »
Anti-spam vendor Cloudmark announced it has acquired Bizanga, which provides messaging software for service providers. Comments: Helps Cloudmark offer a fuller messaging solution to service providers. That makes sense. Bizanga executed well in a very difficult, highly competitive market. It succeeded in getting some major, high-visibility clients, including Cox Communications. Bizanga investors had extremely high... read more »
The Experts Conference has a very deep technical lineup of Exchange sessions planned. The event is April 25-28 in Los Angeles. I will be conference chair again this year. The agenda includes: An opportunity to sound off on what you like and don’t like about Exchange Server, and where you think Microsoft is missing out... read more »
Exchange 2010 includes archiving and e-discovery; these need powerful indexing capabilities. Third-party on-premise archiving vendors struggle constantly with indexing technologies. Indices get corrupt and take days or weeks to regenerate. Searches return results that aren’t as expected, or aren’t understood. Indexing technologies age, and when a vendor replaces them, your corporate memory looks very different.... read more »
The single most important technology change of our time is happening around the cloud. Entire industries are being changed or made obsolete. The world as we know it is changing fast. Examples of what has changed: Paper-based maps and manual navigation have been replaced with cloud-based maps and GPS systems. Photography has shifted from film-based... read more »
We’re hearing a series of rumors that something is going badly wrong at Dell/MessageOne. Eg: They’ve lost a huge amount of customer archived email over the past couple of weeks Many customers are making inquiries about other vendors and their ability to ingest/absorb their historic archive data One vendor told us they had been asked... read more »
There are three big players in the professional networking business: LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Xing. LinkedIn is best known in the United States. But France’s Viadeo and Germany’s Xing are important competitors. Viadeo recently paid us a visit. The company’s focus is on Europe and emerging economies. It has 25 million subscribers. It plans to enter... read more »
If you care about compliance, the “Drafts” folder in your Inbox needs to be archived. Archiving vendors take several approaches to email archiving. Some access mailboxes via MAPI and pull items out into the archive. Others intercept SMTP traffic and journal a copy into the archive. Others copy the database transaction logfiles (‘log shipping’) and... read more »
Exchange 2010′s database strategy is very interesting. The new Database Availability Groups and the benefits they offer for data protection and quick recovery are striking. Overall, Microsoft is optimistic that mailboxes will be able to grow to 10GB or more. However, it’s unclear how large mailboxes will perform in practice. Several concerns spring to mind:... read more »
Charmingly named YippieMove helps you migrate email from one message store to another. It’s mainly aimed at small businesses and consumers, who are using a cloud-based service. Easy to use, $14.95/mailbox. It’s just IMAP-IMAP email, no address book or calendar migration services. No, it doesn’t even migrate Notes apps. … David Ferris... read more »
Archiving vendor Mimosa has recently had a couple of small financings: $3M of equity in June, 2009 $4M of debt in November, 2009 Mimosa has never made a profit, and the recession of course has made fund-raising harder. We understand an IPO was deferred due to poor results. We understand, too, that Mimosa sought a... read more »
NOTE OF DECEMBER 9: THIS IS BEING REVISED PER READER FEEDBACK. WE UNDERESTIMATED THE NEED FOR THE USE OF EXPENSIVE STORAGE. FURTHER INPUT WELCOMED Concern is sometimes expressed about the cost of Exchange 2010 storage: Users will have large mailboxes. 5GB to 20GB will be common. Take 10GB as a typical figure, allowing for three... read more »
Whistleblower website Wikileaks recently leaked more than half a million text messages around 9/11. We hesitate to even link to the story, but if you must read it, you can find CNN’s coverage here. There is something sacred about the last messages exchanged with a spouse before a loved one dies. Messages of love. Hurt.... read more »
A highly publicized hack into the email server at a prominent client-research center highlights one of the problems with email evidence. It is far too easy to take things out of context. In this case, over a thousand emails were taken and posted publicly. This has resulted in numerous accusations of collusion and warped data... read more »
There are different approaches to sharing documents, where a group of people want to be able to make comments on a document and alter it. One approach is Track-Changes, which we’re all familiar with in MS Word. This is very useful. But then, after three or four sets of changes, it gets too confusing. The... read more »
Conferencing technology–such as Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting–has two approaches to the audio element. You can route it over the data network, or you can route it over the conventional telephone system (“PSTN” or “Public Switched Telephone Network”). In principle, it’s much better to treat the audio as just another data type for the... read more »
Today, PC-based conferencing vendors such as Cisco, IBM/Lotus, and Microsoft tend to focus on PC-centric innovation. Eg., support for multi-person video cameras, integration with PBXs, integration with desktop applications. However, I think the biggest innovations, starting perhaps in 2012, will be found among mobile phones. These will have sufficient bandwidth and computing power to compete... read more »
Desktop sharing is a useful component of conferencing technology. Its main uses are: Document sharing, so people can work on spreadsheets, word processing documents, and so on, at the same time Informal peer-to-peer help desks and training. Where you show someone how to do something … David Ferris PS. I’m not sure I’m saying anything... read more »
Cloudemail101.org is a useful website that compares cloud-based email offerings. Cloud archiving vendor LiveOffice is behind it. … David Ferris P.S. Sometimes concision is a virtue.... read more »
For the last 10 years, the electronic conferencing world has tended to focus on high-end solutions such as those from Polycom. Think of special conference rooms, expensive WAN links, special equipment, and so on. Over the last five years, PC-based solutions have been evolving. IBM/Lotus has been an innovator. Microsoft has gradually been building a... read more »
Here’s an update on the law suit between ZL Technologies and Gartner. By way of background, in October email archiving vendor ZL Technologies filed a law suit against Gartner asking for $1.7B in damages caused in part by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The story is very interesting from several points of view: It raises the... read more »
Cloud archiving vendor LiveOffice announced it now supports most of the important cloud-based email offerings: 123Together AppRiver Apptix Azaleos Cisco WebEx Mail Google Apps (Premier) groupSPARK Intermedia Microsoft Exchange Online PanTerra Networks USA.NET Yahoo! Zimbra Other POP/IMAP-based solutions Personal Email Accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live HotMail) This is quite interesting, in that it... read more »
Microsoft’s SaaS versions of Exchange/SharePoint/OCS have been out for a year. Here are some updates: BPOS (the bundle of Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, and Live Meeting) has a million paid seats. Largest customer is Glaxo Smith Kline, with 100,000 seats. Microsoft continues to prefer to deliver via business partners. They get 12% of the initial sale,... read more »
Today, November 9, Cisco is launching its email SaaS, Cisco WebEx Mail. This is important. The offering has a reasonable chance at giving Microsoft substantial competition in the messaging and collaboration space. In short: Can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, or Outlook 2010 as rich client Cisco-provided web browser client also available Outlook compatibility... read more »
Many laws and regulations require that certain types of information be kept for specified periods. This is fueling the need for the archiving of information along with associated retention polices. Conflicting pressure comes from legal counsel, which wants information to be destroyed as quickly as possible to reduce exposure and the substantial costs of responding... read more »
When you define a retention policy, don’t just impose on the archive. PSTs and tape backups are still lingering around. They are subject to e-discovery, and retrieving information from them can be extremely expensive and disruptive–far more so than with an archiving tool. Tapes and PSTs need to be disposed of within the retention window.... read more »
Most organizations are unclear about the retention policies they should adopt. That slows the deployment of archiving technology. It usually makes sense to go ahead with archiving in advance of having decided one’s retention policy; that is, start by archiving everything, for an indeterminate period. You still get many of the advantages of archiving, such... read more »