Veritas eases Exchange archiving

Products such as Veritas EV (Enterprise Vault) 6.0 help companies come to grips with managing the long-term storage of e-mail, a popular cause in IT shops contending with legislative requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Fully integrated with Microsoft Exchange -- and soon IBM Lotus Domino/Notes -- and hooking into Veritas NetBackup on the back end, EV also supports any SMTP mail product, albeit with a more limited set of features. EV can even archive Microsoft NTFS file systems and SharePoint Portal Server repositories.

EV provides a flexible and easy-to-use set of tools, leveraging both Active Directory and Exchange's native capabilities, as well as adding more of its own. Administrators have complete control over when e-mail is archived, how much is archived, and to which storage tier it is archived. Even better, the archiving process is transparent to the end-user: The normal envelope icon for an e-mail message is replaced with an "archived" icon, but clicking on that message produces the same result as always, subject only to the speed of the archive store. EV provides sophisticated tools for searching archived e-mail messages, allowing administrators to find messages with specific words in the body or in enclosures, even zipped enclosures. In addition to giving granular controls to administrators, EV enables users to create folders under the inbox with special archiving rules as well, if allowed by the administrator.

In another neat addition, EV can now find Outlook PST (Personal Folder) files throughout the network, and migrate them to the same archive used for all Exchange messages, relieving admins of the need to find and back up local files on each workstation.

Veritas Enterprise Vault 6.0

Symantec
Cost: $14,719 MSRP for a basic Exchange archiving solution for 500 users
Available: Now