With product demand rising, a variety of vendors have moved into the email archiving market. ArcMail Technology , Barracuda Networks Inc. , CA Inc. (Nasdaq: CA), C2C Systems , CommVault Systems Inc. , EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), MessageSolution, Mimosa Systems Inc. , Proofpoint Inc. , Privacy NETworks , and Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) are some of the vendors pushing product innovation.
One issue is how well the archiving systems support different email systems. Most applications are designed to work with Microsoft Exchange, which is far and away the most popular email system. In general, archiving systems offer fewer functions and features that work with other email systems.
The number of archiving systems that work with IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)'s Domino and Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL)'s GroupWise, for example, have increased, but are still not widespread, according to Carolyn DiCenzo, a vice president at research firm Gartner Inc. In some cases, companies with those systems are forced to fall back upon least common denominator functionality, such as support at the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol gateway level, rather than take advantage of the full feature set that's available for Exchange.
This limitation is becoming more important because users now desire more than generic indexing and search features. Companies are looking for ways to manage messages based on their value, according to DiCenzo. This desire can seem a bit nebulous, but increasingly, they want to create archives where information is categorized by topic or content or users' job functions. Ideally, all messages would be placed in specially designed folders that identify their value, so it becomes simpler to find vital information.
Better programming tools are needed to support such functions. Email suppliers need to provide more robust application programming interfaces within their products. This has been taking place. Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) added envelope journaling function to its system, which provides more granular retention features. The archiving vendors can then build upon these features.
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