Long term archives for local government

[dandy34]

My city will soon be moving to OES2 suite with Groupwise and Zen, I'm excited about the move but have one concern. Local governments apparently fall under some laws requiring us to archive emails for a certain amount of time in order to guard against any litigation that might come up as the result of a message sent or received.
Does Groupwise have the ability to store archives long term? I've read about email archive requirements but can't tell whether GW will meet that requirement or if we'll have to purchase an additional software package.
I'm familiar with the GWArchive that's created and stored on the local pc but I don't think that will meet a real archive need.
Depending on who I ask, the requirement may be for us to store for ten years. If that's true we'll run out of space pretty quickly, right now the IMAP stores are about 20 GB.
Any help is appreciated,

Sam

 

[goombawaho]

Groupwise archives can be forced onto any drive you want. And in fact, you would be crazy to have it set to the local C: drive. So, you could specify a network drive dedicated solely to GroupWise archives. The problem involves archives growing so large that it becomes unruly and potentially unstable if 10 years were kept in a single archive folder for each user. So then you think, okay, let's break it by year. See the following article to explain what I mean and how it's done in GroupWise.

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/15664.html

http://wind.caspercollege.edu/~doit/how_to/multi-archives.html

The issue then becomes - is there a way to automate the creation of yearly archive folders so that you don't have to depend on the user to do it. You know that if you leave it to users, they'll end up with 10 years worth of e-mail in a single folder (archive) because they forgot to create their "year" folders or forgot to switch the Groupwise client to archive in the newly created folder.

At this point, I don't know how to automate the creation of new yearly folders and forcing the Groupwise client to archive to the new folder. This is where we need to hear of some brilliant method or else I would recommend a third party software to do the trick.

The other issue that you absolutely have to think about is this. A GroupWise archive depends on the user. If I receive an e-mail (as a user) and delete immediately before a nightly backup (and therefore certainly before it gets archived), there is no record of that e-mail. So, if there is a lawsuit, you are screwed. The e-mail existed, the user saw the e-mail, but you have no proof of it.

Based on this fact (in addition to the above situation), I recommend that you purchase a third party software to handle your e-mail archiving. The reason is that they sit in front of the user or parallel to the e-mail server and the user never has a chance to delete anything without the archive software making a copy of it. Same goes for SENT e-mails - everything is captured and the user cannot influence the process. You have a 100% accurate copy of everything sent and received.

 

[goombawaho]

Take a look at this as one product that would work.

http://www.messagingarchitects.com/en/gwarchive/prodlit/GWArchiveDatasheet.pdf

You don't necessarily have to have a product that is made for Groupwise, especially if you have an e-mail gateway (a linux-based server perhaps) that is outside of the Groupwise system that handles all inbound and outbound e-mails.

 

[MetraRider]

Another choice is Nexic Discovery. It works on a separate server and works within Groupwise to ensure that files are not deleted from the trash before they get archived.

http://www.nexic.com

 

[marvhuffaker]

GroupWise natively does a terrible job at archiving. I would recommend GWArchive, as has been already mentioned.

just to be clear, when we say "GWARCHIVE", we are referring to the product by Messaging Architects. It's not the same as the GroupWise Archive function that's built into GroupWise.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[dandy34]

Thanks everyone for your help, I have a number of directions I can look into now.

Sam Dee
IS Admin
City of Siloam Springs, AR