Migrating Shortcuts - Why Bother?

Bob Spurzem over at Ferris Research this morning discussed some key issues and points to consider when performing archive migrations. As the leader in the archive migration market, our team has focused a lot of effort into dealing with shortcuts. (http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/03/email-archive-migration-plan-for-stubbing/)

One can argue "You should not use shortcuts anyway"

Sure, but go tell that to your user community that has 1000's if not 10,000's of shortcuts in their Exchange mailbox and tell them that they are going to go away because it is not good practice to have them. That should go over very well. Some of the user archives that we have migrated had over 60,000 shortcuts in a single mailbox. Not exactly the easiest thing to transition users from using.

So this brings up a key point in selecting an archive migration application. Simply being able to move the archived content from one platform to another is not enough. The absolute must is to ensure that all data is migrated and that end users are not impacted. Users typically resist change, even if they are told it will be good change. Making sure how they get access to their data stays consistent is an absolute.

So why bother migrating shortcuts? Well, if you don't, just be ready for the user revolt...

Transformation of Email Archiving

I started my technology career around the time Microsoft Mail was being introduced and messages were being sent to other employees just to see "did you really get that"? After this amazing addition of technology happened, the company I worked for added a 'dial-up gateway' where messages were sent over this magical thing called the Internet, it queued messages up on the server and dialed up and processed these messages, checked to see if any were destined for its users and then hung up, only to do the task again at a blazing speed of 14.4 kbps in another 3o minutes.

Email archiving in its rawest form has been around as long as the email environmnets have existed. Users have saved emails into some form of a personal archive, corporations have saved email on tape, made duplicate copies, or some other form of application to secure and store email longer than it was perhaps "intended" to be around. Regardless, it is.

Some of the top leading email archive applications today, have existed for over 10 years. Email archiving is not a new fad that is simply going to go away. It has become a major requirement for messaging infrastructures and an expectation to be deployed in the top Fortune 5000+ companies whether they are a financial industry regulated company or not. The latest analyst reports indicate that there are over 25,000 deployments of enterprise email archives in the world and is still one of the fastest growing market segments for enterprise software and storage.

So if email archiving is nothing "new" and is deployed in the top accounts across the globe, how can it be transforming. The transformation comes from the constant change in the market; archiving vendors get acquired: OTG to Legato to EMC, KVS to Veritas to Symantec, Educom to Zantaz to Atonomy, Persist (spun off from Zantaz) to HP, and more. These are some of the top deployed archiving applications in the world and they are changing ownership, adding features and improving their products. So if the vendors are constantly making changes, how could it be assumed that customers would not?

End users are constantly changing their minds about what they want and need. Maybe it's because a really good sales person convinced them they need their product, or they are sick of supporting an end user that always complains about some feature not working or that simply does not exist within their current product. So what are these customers doing? They are making changes. They are changing their archiving applications.

These changes that we are seeing in the market is nothing new for technology. As products and solutions improve, customers want their environment to improve as well. Customers make changes for all reasons good and bad; cost, features, functions, storage management, political, 'cause there is a cool button' and more.

The email archiving market is transforming. It's transforming from a rich green field of opportunities that all you had to do was throw a few lawn darts and wherever they landed was your next million dollar archiving sale. To today where the opportunities exist, but the field is already full of paying customers on competitive platforms. Tomorrow's customers were the competitor's customer 1,3,5 years ago. Opportunity exists in these 25,000+ accounts for vendors to sell them their solution. Customers have already determined that they need an archiving product. Vendors just need to convince the customers that their product is best for them now and that migrating the data will magically happen.

End users need to ask themselves if their product is the best for them. If not, now is the time to determine which product is. We've proven that these archives are not going away anytime soon. The archive market is transforming. Is your vendor helping you get to where you want to be?