| Discovery management | Rating  |
All content is indexed as it's archived. This includes sender and recipient information as well as the message body and attachments.
Administrators have two ways to organize archives. First, they can create multiple archive stores. Each archive store, for example, might contain messages from a specific period (i.e., month, quarter, or year) in order to minimize search effort and time. Second, search folders can be built that cause all messages meeting specific criteria to appear on demand without rebuilding the search attributes each time.
The reason I dropped the discovery capability rating is MailArchiver's inability to lock and manage messages as part of one or more legal holds. This functionality would prevent inadvertent deletion of messages of interest due to retention policies or other administrative tasks. I hope GFI plans to implement this in the future.
| Ease of Use | Rating  |
Users access their archived content via an Outlook add-on. Each archive store appears as a folder. Accessing a message in one of the stores is as easy as click and copy/restore. Bulk restores are just as easy.
Single message and bulk restores are possible from the central admin console as well. Further, the console allows the admin to build and prioritize policies, print reports, and access audit information.
Another nice feature is cross-access configuration. It's often necessary when an employee leaves the company to gain access to his or her email. MailArchiver allows configuration of another user for access to the former employee's archives.
| Security | Rating |
I like to see two basic security capabilities in a message archiving system. First, the solution must track access, providing alerts or audit trails to prevent or report possible data leakage. MailArchiver accomplishes this with,
- Auditing of messages moving in or out of the archive
- Logging of all maintnenance tasks
- Logging and alerting of bulk restores
Second, I like to see significant granularity in administrative privilege assignments. Although MailArchiver provides separation of admin and general user access, I'd like to see improved capability to pick and choose which admin tasks I want a user to perform. This is probably a bigger problem for large companies with admin tasks divided between teams. However, I dropped the Security rating because of this issue.
| Licensing and Price | Rating |
Overall, you get a lot for what GFI expects in payment. Pricing tables are available at the GFI Web site. I believe the price vs. value rating is excellent. My issue is with licensing.
A MailArchiver license is necessary for each account in Active Directory, although you can create exclusion lists. This is an easy to manage licensing configuration.
GFI tracks the number of licenses purchased against the number of eligible AD accounts. If the number of accounts exceeds the number of licenses, MailArchiver stops archiving. I have no problem with this approach. I fully support vendor license tracking. My problem is with how archiving is stopped; no advance warning is provided to the administrator that archiving is about to be terminated. Even though users can still access already archived messages, and messages continue to be journaled in Exchange, I believe vendors need to provide a heads-up when their license policing algorithm is about to shut me down.
The final word
Overall, I found MailArchiver to be a great solution for SMBs. It's feature-rich, easily meeting all the challenges I listed in the opening section of this review. Even though it has a couple of issues I'd like to see addressed, I highly recommend this product.
A fully functional evaluation copy is available for download. If you're looking for an email archiving solution for an SMB, I strongly encourage you give MailArchiver a look.
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