Planning
AXLR8 work with your systems support team to plan the service which will be there for many years to come.
For example, we will look at capacity planning for the future, often estimating requirements in disk space and bandwidth for back ups for the next twenty years based on the best data we have available. Your systems support people will know your systems and usage patterns and be best to advise us on your long term requirements.
Without removing any flexibility to change technology or capacity as necessary, this gives us all a good idea of what the costs and system resource needs will be for the near, mid term and long term future of the service.
Filtering
Most clients pass their mail through AXLR8 MailManager to strip out a large proportion of unwanted spam and viruses. Unwanted emails of this type probably outnumber your required emails by 5:1. Yes, that is 60-90% of email in the world is now spam! So it is advisable to use a mail filter out on the internet BEFORE you receive them at your MS Exchange server let alone store emails in an archive.
Installation
Next we install your MessageStore server and all associated back up facilities for the many years ahead based on the capacity growth predictions in the capacity planning phase. We then set up the MS Exchange transfers so that mail is passed into the system live. Mail which enters your local company mail server(s), internal mail and mail sent out from your staff is all stored, with attachments. The installation can take a half day depending upon the circumstances. It is also necessary to consider spam and virus filtering outside your organisation so that the maximum percentage of cleaned mail enters your office. An external cleaning service is essential. Also, you will need to decide what to do with the existing mail on your server. It will probably be tens of Gigabytes. Unfortunately, pre-AXLR8, it will not include many important emails that staff have deleted. However, it can be added to the mail archive. This may take several days to process depending on the circumstances.
Indexing
The mail is stored against subject line, sender recipient and date and this means every mail must be indexed as it comes in and stored appropriately in fast indexing storage structures.
Legacy email foundation
This involved capturing the emails that are flying in and out will take some time to transfer up out of your server in “real time” whilst managing the upload of the foundation of legacy emails that have collected over the years. This legacy can be tens of Gb and your systems people will arrange for it to bulk upload on the appropriate lines during the best off peak times. Meanwhile, checks and diagnostics are examined by AXLR8 staff and your systems network and server support people to ensure mail is captured and accounted for.
Privacy and security consulting
You will then have a facility where you have control of all mail entering, leaving and moving around your company. There are implications for personnel to whom you delegate the authority to search these mails. For example, it is great that a sales person can see what another sales person quoted three years ago. However, that sales person should not necessarily see all emails between his boss and a peer!