A client of ours saw the benefits of moving Exchange email archiving into the cloud, but one issue was holding things up. Her users really liked their current LAN-based system’s ability to reproduce their personal folders in their personal archive. Until recently, no online archive did that, so she was sticking with an application that was expensive and difficult to manage. Now, however, things have changed.

Symantec.cloud, formerly MessageLabs, now synchronizes each user’s personal folders to another set in its online archive.

How It Works

From the user’s point of view, the Web-based archive client can be opened either as a window inside Outlook or as an independent application in a Web Browser.

Behind the scenes, a lightweight application on a workstation at the client’s premises tracks folder and message movements for all designated users. As end users create, delete and rename folders as well as move email messages from one Outlook folder to another, the scheduled synchronization service duplicates the folders and message locations in the users’ archive.

After the initial synchronization, the service sends only incremental mailbox folder changes to the online archive. These can be scheduled hourly, daily or weekly as the customer sees fit. Soft deletes move items to the “Deleted Items” folder while hard deletes leave the item in the last folder in which it existed (NOTE: Email cannot be deleted from the archive).

Folder Synchronization is an add-on service to Symantec.cloud’s Archive L service. It does not require plug-ins or dedicated hardware and Administrators can selectively deploy Folder Synchronization on a per-user and/or Exchange Server basis. CGNET resells and supports this service.