How many times we have used the restore option to get that one mail or those precious emails that got deleted and now only resides in one those many back tapes back in the store rooms. Yes we are talking about Exchange Server and the problems of its Administrators. Recovery Storage Group is good, but there are better options available.

  

 

I remember working with Mimosa NearPoint which manipulates the Message store to get its content from Exchange Server to SQL and then stores the actual content in a file with pointer to SQL database. A wonderful product no doubt. What about using the Exchange Servers own archiving method, and making things more easy. A web client and a query to SQL server with description and lo you see your message in the web client and then choose what to do with that ... sounds good. That’s what GFI MailArchiver does.

GFI MailArchiver is an archiving solution for SMBs. Reasonably Priced, the software archives all corporate email, reduces dependency on troublesome PST files, permits employees to access old and deleted emails at any time and from any location and helps companies meet eDiscovery and legal compliance requirements.”


GFI MailArchiver uses Exchange Servers Journaling feature, so you have to enable journaling on  your server.

How to Enable Message Journaling:


GFI MailArchiver 6 now allows end-users to search and access all their old and deleted emails from a folder in their Outlook email client. Integration with Outlook means that archived email can be assessed from Outlook as if it were their Exchange mailbox or local PST file. GFI MailArchiver users can now enjoy a faster and improved experience than those using stubs.

No Stubs : This is very good feature many archiving solutions leave a small stub file in place of the archived message that can be used by end-users to retrieve archived messages from the archival system however this creates problems for administrators in terms of server performance as small portions of the emails are still left into the Exchange Server store. I think this is because using journaling rather than manipulating the message store as mentioned earlier.


System Requirement:

1.Windows 2000 (SP 3 above) or Windows 2003. The box need to be in DC or part of the domain as it utilizes Active Directory.

2. Exchange Server 2000 and above

3.MS .NET Framework 2.0

4.IIS - WWW service ASP .net needs to be registered with IIS.
How? : Please follow the procedure below to register ASP.NET:

   1. Open Command Prompt.
   2. Change directory as follows:
          * For 32-bit machines change to:
            <WindowsDir>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<version number>\
          * For 64-bit machines change to:
            <WindowsDir\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\<version number>\
   3. Run the command ‘aspnet_regiis.exe -i’ and press enter.


One more advantage with GFI over other Archiving Solutions, you can use SQL Server only if you can afford or use the free open source FireBird. That’s saving !,  check out more details at their official site : FireBird

dragover="true" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> The installation went very smooth by following the user manual. The user manual is very good I must say and if followed sincerely you should not have any issue.

Looks good so far.. I will update more on this as I go explore in the coming week. Catch ya later.

Dominic
MVP - Exchange Server