| All of this talk of mailbox restrictions is very nice, but what do we do if our post office is already too big or if it keeps on growing in spite of what we've implemented in the previous sections? Well, you can ask or even force your users to start using the GroupWise archives. And although that might indeed take some pressure off your post offices, this might also give you some other headaches: Messages and attachments that are sent to multiple users on your post office and are stored only once (single instance); however, if you use the GroupWise archive to store them in another storage location, each item will be stored separately for every user. These items are thus stored multiple times, which potentially leads to unacceptably high storage needs. Messages stored in GroupWise archives are not always (easily) accessible to the user and certainly not to others. It might be difficult to stay compliant with rules and regulations if you need to provide fast and immediate access to all items, as required by, for example, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. You will need the GroupWise client to read the messages, and the mailbox account will need to exist in your system to get access to the GroupWise archive. There are some tricks to circumvent this, but all in all it's difficult if not impossible to access an archive without the proper software and the account in your GroupWise environment.
These are just a few examples of why it might be a good idea to take a closer look at a more permanent and flexible solution. And the good news is this: There are several third parties that offer such a solution. These solutions will all be able to either copy or export all messages out of your message store to an alternative format like XML or to a database. And they will make sure that these messages are stored only once, even if that message was sent to multiple users on the same post office. Furthermore, these solutions will offer external viewers that will give rapid access to either the XML store or to the database. Very detailed descriptions of all these solutions are outside the scope of this book, but take a look at these third parties (in alphabetical order): IntelliReach offers MessageArchive, which creates a single-instance storage database to store all messages. MessageArchive collects email over a standard IMAP/SSL interface utilizing the IMAP API available in GroupWise. It includes features like Smart Indexing, capturing a "smart" index of dates, email addresses, select keywords, and proper nouns in a natural language processing engine. After an initial matter search is performed, a detailed, full-text index is created for subsequent legal and regulatory inquiries. You can find more information at www.intellireach.com. Messaging Architects offers GWArchive, which enhances the existing GroupWise archive with several useful features, but also allows you to publish or export GroupWise information into special XML archives or databases. The very powerful yet intuitive XML viewer has several very interesting features to access these XML archives and to investigate these archives in much detail. The GWArchive server has direct access to the GroupWise message store based on the trusted API and can handle all publishing and export tasks automatically. You can find more information at www.messagingarchitects.com. Nexic offers Discovery, a powerful solution to export and publish GroupWise data, giving access to all information stored in GroupWise. The Discovery process will be able to export the GroupWise information automatically in almost any desired format, from a simple ASCII text file to very elaborate XML formats and many database types as well. Additional tools complement this solution and will give rapid access to all the stored information, either onsite or elsewhere, stored for example on a DVD including the viewer. You can find more information at www.nexic.com.
The good news is that GroupWise is very extensible, and especially this latest GroupWise 7 version has several new features that are important for the developers of these types of solutions. And more and more GroupWise environments are implementing these solutions to be compliant with rules and regulations, such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley. |
