You've probably gathered that Exchange Server 2010 has introduced the "personal archive". It sounds exciting, but it is essentially just a second user-accessible mailbox, designed to take the storage pressure off primary mailboxes.

This certainly addresses some of the email storage and archiving issues we're facing, but it's still just a first-draft solution, and a little primitive. All credit to the Microsoft Exchange Team for acknowledging the issue but, if you want comprehensive* archiving, you still need to use 3rd-party tools. This is currently the only way to provide "Organizational Archiving", which is where Exchange 2010 still falls short.

Luckily for you, the market is awash with archiving tools, and of course, if you haven't actually got as far as upgrading to Exchange 2010 yet, then you're reliant on this clamouring marketplace. If that's the situation you find yourself in, then you might be interested to know that Red Gate's latest gladiatorial entry to this crowded arena - Exchange Server Archiver v3 - already supports Exchange Server 2007 and 2003, and now supports 2010 as well. Given that I've been harping on about Organizational archiving, I'm honor-bound to mention that the Exchange Server Archiver is a high-performance, enterprise-ready tool. And as it's a Red Gate tool, you get everything in one package and the pricing is simple, with no hidden extra costs.

Cheers,

Michael Francis

*By "comprehensive", I mean support for auditing, encryption, data-mining and visualization, to name just a few of our many needs. Microsoft are busy guys, so we need to help them out until they can get round to satisfying the whims of managers, auditors and analysts.