Archiving Sends Mixed Messages

BOSTON -- E-mail Archiving and Management (EAM) technologies archive the contents of mail servers into a centrally-managed repository. EAM technology has become critical to both commercial and government enterprises but for a variety of different and sometimes conflicting reasons. This has led to a similarly diverse set of approaches from EAM suppliers, according to research released today by CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies.

Long considered an inconvenient backwater by many enterprises, recent developments have elevated the importance of e-mail archiving and management, including:

The logic to consolidate, sort, and index all mail into a single long-term archive is simple. Although EAM tools can be expensive, field experience suggests that successful deployments can yield a fast return on the investment.

These findings come from E-mail Archiving and Management Report 2008, released today. This groundbreaking report evaluates fourteen major EAM suppliers, based on extensive technology research and customer interviews. The 195-page report also provides a breakdown of common usage scenarios to help with selecting an EAM system.“Nobody really wants to face up to the problems that corporate e-mail mountains cause,” notes Alan Pelz-Sharpe, lead analyst on the report. “But since e-mail volumes typically exceed on an order of magnitude (10x) that of files and documents within an enterprise, information chaos is more acute here than anywhere else, so it’s time to deal with it.”

CMS Watch