LiveOffice Streamlines Migration From Microsoft's Exchange Hosted Archive To LiveOffice’s Cloud Archiving

In an unusual development, a vendor is working with Microsoft to take over something that the software giant can't do. LiveOffice is partnering with Microsoft to streamline the migration process for some of Microsoft's Exchange Hosted Archive users to LiveOffice’s cloud archiving product. This is a followup to Microsoft’s launch of Office 365, which is when Microsoft began transitioning existing EHA users to Exchange Online Archiving. However, some users' needs aren't met by either Exchange Online Archiving or the built-in archiving features of Office 365, such as users who want to archive other content types, have stricter regulatory requirements or cannot host Exchange Online Archiving.

This is where LiveOffice comes in, says Nick Mehta, CEO of the Torrance, Calif.-based company. The company’s Fast Pass migration program preserves metadata for maintaining the "chain of custody" for data, which is important for e-discovery purposes, he says. The LiveOffice service can also capture documents, instant messages, social media and text, and encrypts, replicates and indexes it. This means companies can search the data when they need to, whether for e-discovery, regulatory compliance or just for searching, he says. In addition to Exchange, it supports Domino, Google Apps, Dropbox, Box and SharePoint, he says.

"With about 18,000 customers, LiveOffice has its historic roots in small and midsize financial services firms, but more recently has had good success in selling to larger firms across a range of vertical markets," wrote Brian Hill, principal analyst for Forrester Research, in its recent report Market Overview: Message Archiving Software-As-A-Service. "LiveOffice’s SaaS-based offering provides rich archiving and compliance functionality and merits a good position on enterprise short lists. Althoughsmaller than some of the other providers in this evaluation, LiveOffice has strong, strategically significant partnerships with major technology vendors." LiveOffice is a good fit for organizations transitioning from Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive, particularly those with stringent compliance needs or seeking to archive a broad set of content and application types, he added.

The biggest news in the announcement is the amount of trust that Microsoft puts in LiveOffice, says Brian Babineau, VP of research and analyst services at Enterprise Strategy Group. First, Microsoft is recommending that select customers work with an emerging vendor to address specific information retention requirements. Second, the subset of customers that Microsoft is steering toward LiveOffice are ones with strict compliance and e-discovery requirements. Give Microsoft credit for recognizing where its own archiving solution cannot meet the discrete needs of customers, and kudos to LiveOffice for building such a robust SaaS archiving offering that supports mission-critical enterprise processes, he says.As a bit of context for the value to this relationship, ESG research estimates that the SaaS email archiving addressable market will exceed $700 million by 2015, largely due to the compliance and e-discovery demands placed on large and small companies, he adds.

The migration service is available now and is free. The LifeOffice cloud archiving service is charged on a per-user per-month basis with no storage charges.

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