How it works

Archive Attender® is designed as an administrator tool to help organizations manage their email storage. It requires no additional hardware, or purchase of any additional software, which makes deployment simple and requires no client installation for users to access their archived messages.

Product Architecture

Archive Attender contains three major components: an application console serving as the administrator’s user interface to setup, configure and manage the processing of the product, a Windows NT service which performs all the activities tasked by the administrator and an Internet Information Server (IIS) web application providing users with access to their archived messages through Outlook and Outlook Web Access.

Archive Attender - Administrator Console

Archive Attender uses no databases; all necessary configuration details are maintained in xml files and in the registry of the local computer. Besides Internet Information Server and the dot net frameworks, all other required components are installed by the application.

Managing Users in Archive Attender

Users, whose data need to be archived, can be added into the Archive Attender configuration by either querying Active Directory or by having Archive Attender log into the Global Address List (GAL) and query the Exchange Server. This process of adding users may also be scheduled so that Archive Attender can periodically re-query and automatically add new users that have been added to the specified Active Directory path or new mailboxes that have been added to the targeted Exchange Server.

Once users have been added to Archive Attender, there are a number of options that can be configured for them by the administrator, options such as the ability to search the archives, the ability to archive, restore and delete messages, customize the display of the archives and the assignment of policies to be enforced on the user emails.

Archive Attender Policies

Archive Attender employs an easy to use architecture to give an administrator the ability to mine through users’ mailboxes and archive messages that meet the organization’s retention policy requirements. Policies can be defined to query Exchange Servers to capture the messages to be archived based on message conditions such as age, date, size, sender, keywords in the subject and user mailbox quota settings. This criteria set could beexpanded to include additional options such as keywords in the message body, attachment names and types, mailbox sizes, etc., by using Archive Attender in conjunction with Mail Attender for Exchange Enterprise Edition.

Archive Attender policies also include options to target specific types of content from within the mailboxes and also to restrict the mining to a limited set of folders rather than looking through all folders within the mailbox.

Once a policy is created, it can be assigned to the users on whom the policy must be enforced. Policies can be processed either manually or by enabling the policy schedule option to automate its execution.

Archive Attender – New Policy

Archiving by Mailbox Quotas

As mentioned in the previous section, Archive Attender offers the ability to archive messages based on a mailbox’s quota settings. This feature can be setup to use one of the four Exchange quota settings or to define a specific mailbox size within the policy that would be used to evaluate the user’s mailbox size.

The implementation of the archiving process based on quota targets mailboxes that are at a given high-mark percentage of the mailbox’s allowed quota (say 90% for instance) and archive messages until the mailbox reaches an optimum percentage of the mailbox’s quota (say 50% for example). The administrator must also define the property of the messages that must be archived to bring the user’s mailbox to the optimum level; the choices are the size and/or age of the message. A weighted scale, based on the size and age selection, determines the messages that will be archived.

The policy also includes a few fail-safe options to prevent the archiving of very small and/or very recently received messages.

Archive Attender – Settings for archiving by mailbox quota

Allowing Users to Archive Messages

In addition to enforcing policies to archive messages out of a user’s mailbox, Archive Attender includes the ability for an administrator to allow a user to archive his or her own messages out of the mailbox. This is accomplished using Outlook categories with a custom category called *Archive Message. Users may select all the messages that they would like archived and assign the *Archive Message category. Archive Attender periodically scans mailboxes of users that are authorized to archive messages and removes all messages categorized as *Archive Message, replacing them with a stub message. The process of scanning mailboxes, looking for messages marked to be archived, is initiated as a periodic maintenance task by the Archive Attender service. The administrator can configure the frequency of this process.

User Access to Archives

One of the hallmark features of Archive Attender is its ability to provide a user access to all messages archived out of his or her mailbox through Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA), without having to install any components on the user’s local computer. There are two methods of access to the archive that can be provided to the users, both of which are controlled by the administrator.

The first is to define a policy to retain stubs when messages are archived out of the user’s mailbox. The policy configuration permits the configuration of the action taken in the user’s mailbox after a message has been successfully archived. This includes one of three options: leave a copy of the message in the mailbox, remove the message from the mailbox or replace the message in the mailbox with a stub of the original. Choosing the option to leave a stub replaces the archived message in the user’s mailbox with a condensed version of it, optionally including an HTTP-based link. The user could click on this link to quickly retrieve and view the original message in an Outlook message window. Viewing the message from the archive does not in any way affect the stub message in the mailbox or the original message in the archive.

Archive Attender – Stub message in Outlook

The other method of providing a user access to his or her archives is by enabling the display of the search interface within the user’s Outlook client. This must be done through the administrator console of Archive Attender. Enabling this option generates a folder in the user’s mailbox, which displays a web-based interface. Provided the user has been given the appropriate privileges through the administrator console, he or she using this interface can search, view, restore and delete messages archived out of his or her mailbox.

Archive Attender – User interface in Outlook to search archives

Both of the user methods of accessing archived messages described above are also available through Outlook Web Access.

Importing from PST Files

Archive Attender includes a separate PST importing component that can be used to import all or selected messages from PST files into the user’s archive, eliminating the need to retain the PST files. This functionality is limited to network-based PST files only and relies on the administrator associating PST files, discovered by the PST import utility, with users that have been configured in Archive Attender. This mapping of PST files to Archive Attender users is used to determine the archives to import the messages from the PST files into.

The configuration of the import process also includes an option to provide users with the stub of the message being imported into the archive. This stub message can be generated in the PST file or in the mailbox of the user associated with the PST file. If the administrator chooses to create the stub in the user’s mailbox, a separate folder is created at the root of the user’s mailbox and the stub is generated in the same folder path as the original message in the PST file. Using this option should eliminate the need for the user to go back to the PST file.

Searching the Archives

The archive search interface, built into the Archive Attender console, gives the administrator the ability to search all indexed messages stored in the archives. The option to index messages can be enabled if searching the archives is required by the administrator and/or users. If not, the archived messages do not need to be indexed. The user’s ability to access messages using stubs does not rely on the index and would continue to function even if an index is not generated. For messages that have been indexed, the administrator has the ability to query them based on keywords contained within the message header, body and content of attachments as well as by sender, recipient, received and archived dates and several other criteria. The results of the search could be opened, copied to a mailbox or copied to a PST file. As described earlier, users can also be given the ability to search indexed messages that are archived out of their mailboxes using a web interface displayed in Outlook.

Archive Attender – Search Archives from administrator console

Archive Attender® Logging

Archive Attender also includes extensive logging capabilities. All activities, performed by the Archive Attender service and the Archive Attender console, are logged daily in an HTML format. Detail information of all tasks processed by Archive Attender is logged in a text format and can be used to review the activities performed. Debug logging may also be enabled to capture more detailed information about the processes completed.

Product Licensing

The evaluation version of Archive Attender, limited to the processing of ten mailboxes, may be downloaded for a trial period of forty-five days. This version does include all the capabilities of the full, licensed version.

In order to use the full version of the product, the evaluation installation of Archive Attender must be upgraded using the installer for the full version. This version includes an interface to enter and manage license keys provided by Sherpa Software, which will permit the processing of more than the evaluation limit of ten mailboxes.