Why We Picked Quest Archive Manager

At this point, it’s no surprise that organizations are striving to manage their knowledge by archiving their email. Not only have demands escalated for organizational transparency and legal discovery of documents, but also growing organizations are finding their email at the center of their activities and its mushrooming content increasingly harder to leverage. Thus, CGNET decided it was time to add message archiving to our messaging services.

Last fall, we introduced CGNET eMail Vault, a comprehensive message archiving system based on Quest Software’s Archive Manager. Leading up to the introduction was almost a year of research and testing, most of it carried out by Messaging and Development Services engineer Eric Romero.

Romero reviewed many products on the market, narrowing them down to a short list for intensive research and, finally, to two products for in-house testing. Those two were Symantec Enterprise Vault and Archive Manager.

Quest Stands Out
Archive Manager stood out for three reasons, Romero said. First, the client software is entirely browser-based, which vastly simplifies installation, particularly in widely dispersed organizations. Also, “it was always possible to browse the archive, which was not always the case with the Symantec solution, ” he said. Finally, the level of technical support was a lot better.

CGNET eMail Vault has other advantages, too. Its true single-instance storage means that only one copy of an attachment goes into the archive, no matter how many messages contain it. This controls data volume and reduces the cost of storage management.

The product’s browser-based interface allows users to find and retrieve data in minutes, by enabling them to visually zero in on specific content. Granular permissions can be set to retrieve items from particular mailboxes or across the entire organization. Its comprehensive searches can be based on sender, recipient, date, subject, message keyword or attachment keyword.

Romero also noted that Quest is constantly improving its product. “They are rapidly producing new versions with better features,” he said.