Google Offers Online Archiving for Hosted Email

In a move that ups the ante in Google's SaaS push, the vendor has quietly added archiving to its hosted email services.

Called Google Message Discovery, the new service is offered for Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino customers, or as an add-on to the existing Google Apps, which include Google's Gmail service as well as Google Calendar, talk messaging and voice over IP, online document hosting and collaboration, and other features.

Google Message Discovery was announced in the vendor's Official Google Enterprise Blog last week -- which is the way Google makes nearly all its product announcements, in order to drive traffic to its sites.

The new set of features, collectively called Google Message Discovery, is aimed at archiving email and providing on-demand e-discovery. They are being offered through a hosted network equipped with technology from Postini, the email archiving vendor Google acquired for $628 million in July 2007.

Google Message Discovery captures and indexes messages, enforces policies, consolidates email from multiple sources, searches messages for legal hold or retention, and logs all activities for audit purposes.These functions are added to Google Apps' threat protection, (including encryption); content policy management (including filters for Social Security or credit card numbers); and foreign language support for hosted email.

Pricing Google Message Discovery for non-Google email customers is $25 per user for a fully loaded subscription that includes one year of retention for archived email. Google charges $10 per user for each additional year of archiving. Each user can be allocated unlimited email storage space, Google says.

Google Message Discovery won't be offered for free to universities and colleges, which have widely adopted the freebie version of Google Apps. But the new service will be offered to schools at a 66 percent discount.

With this announcement, Google steps into competition with a range of email archiving service providers such as Zantaz (now part of Autonomy), Fortiva, LiveOffice, MessageOne, and MessageOne resellers IBM, Iron Mountain, and Sungard, to name a few. Zmanda also archives email using Amazon's S3 service.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.