This article was written by Bill England, Director of Strategic
Alliances, Colligo Networks.
Recently, we've been working with a customer on a particularly
interesting use case for SharePoint that I thought others in the
community might be interested in learning more about. The customer
is using Zantaz (from Autonomy/HP) for email archiving with a
primary focus around eDiscovery, email retention and legal hold. A
number of factors are driving the review their current
implementation, including its age and cost to maintain, and
concerns about the recent flux in HP strategy.
All of the standard email archiving vendors are invited to bid,
but I have become convinced, given the tightly bounded requirements
laid out by the customer, that a Microsoft-centric solution would
more than address their requirements, as well as provide
substantial cost savings, since much of the software is covered
under their Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) (Exchange,
SharePoint, Office, etc.).
Roughly speaking, here is how the current Zantaz solution
works:
Emails arrive in the end user's Inbox and can be deleted within
30 days to ensure there is no permanent record of any kind, unless
they are on legal hold (this reduces the volume of junk into
storage)
After 30 days, the emails are stubbed into the Zantaz archive and
are loaded back into Outlook when the user clicks on them. Emails
that users believe to have business value are filed into three-,
five-, seven-, and 15-year retention folders. Emails not filed to
the retention folders, but older than one year are deleted (the
default retention schedule is one year) eDiscovery, legal hold,
etc. are done via Zantaz tools on the Zantaz archive
To replace the Zantaz solution with SharePoint, the company
could simply:
Configure Exchange for single item recovery for one-year and
then delete thereafter Deploy Colligo (for email management) so
that users can easily file emails into the three, five-, seven-,
and 15-year retention folders that are now based in the SharePoint
Records Center Complete their eDiscovery, legal hold, etc. in
SharePoint 2010 & Exchange, possibly with FAST search.
For an enhanced solution, I would recommend replacing the
retention folders with metadata tagging / content types such as
invoice, contract, proposal, etc. Then, the records manager or
compliance officer can determine (and easily bulk-change) the
retention and disposition schedule for these items, as opposed to
relying on the end user to know the appropriate folder in which to
file them.
In addition to meeting their requirements, for an organization
that already owns Exchange, SharePoint and Office under their EA,
there are compelling cost savings to be had. The annual maintenance
for an email archive system alone can run into the $100k+ per
annum. With an initial upfront investment in Colligo licenses, as
well as some consulting dollars to configure SharePoint for email
records management and search, organizations can be quickly up and
running, and saving money.
Zantax is just one email archiving solution, but there are many
others in use by companies that could quite easily move their email
archiving to SharePoint and leverage the investment they have
already made in the Microsoft stack.
www.colligo.com
Come to the European
SharePoint Conference in
Berlin.
