When I applied to work at Red Gate, I was well aware that it was a revolutionary software company, working on the front line of product development. But nothing could prepare me for the images evoked as I had my first experience of a Red Gate product launch, and met some of the people behind the tool...
I’m new to Red-Gate, and nothing from my previous experience working for Local Government prepared me for my introduction to Marine Barbaroux, on my third day at Red Gate. Marine is the head of the Exchange Division at Red Gate, as well as being a talented artist and photographer. Marine Barbaroux stood on a table in the Red Gate Servery, looking for all the world like part of a revolutionary painting in the Louvre, representing liberté, égalité or fraternité’. She raised a toast to her team. The company had gathered to hear Marine’s announcement, that the Exchange Division were ready to launch the Exchange Server Archiver. Such was the contagious enthusiasm generated around this launch, and the effect of the bubbly, that we’d have carried on and stormed the Bastille if she’d asked for it. Instead, when the celebrations died down, I set off to find out more about the Exchange Archiver product and the people behind it.
Colin Millerchip, the head of Product Management at Red-Gate, is perhaps more ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ than ‘fraternité’. He also glowed with enthusiasm when he recalled the preparation work for the new product.
“Email has become such a pervasive business tool, as you build up the amount of data every day, growing and growing, eventually you get problems around the performance of Exchange Server”. I could appreciate that. Each company I have worked in has implemented different ways of managing mailbox data size. In one company I regularly received emails informing me I had exceeded my mailbox limit, in another, my Outlook data was held in a .PST file. As an administrator, I had found these different enforcements an annoyance; I felt this intrusion to my email was far from the unobtrusive process that it should, and could have been.
It was a problem that came to obsess Colin. Whereas much of Microsoft Exchange was done well, there seemed to be clear grass-roots dissatisfaction with some aspects of Exchange. I wasn’t the only one to occasionally curse the product. The data-management side of Exchange was poor, and there seemed little in the way of third-party tools on the market that made up for the shortfall. The primary research revealed one area where Exchange Server seemed to be struggling to perform, and this was in data management.
Colin’s concluding suggestion was to produce a tool that would solve these difficulties whilst being easier to use, and more affordable, than any other available solution;
Most available products were attempting to solve two rather separate problems, regulatory compliance, and data management. This conflicted with Colin’s findings that many companies saw them as separate concerns, and other companies that weren’t faced with statutory compliance issues. Surely better, he thought, to focus on providing an ideal solution to the data management problem that didn’t have to make compromises for the different demands of a compliance function. More important was to provide something that was easy to install and test out, but robust enough to scale to the users requirements.
A very different developer’s perspective on what became a huge project came from Rob Chipperfield, a Software Engineer at Red Gate. Rob started working on the Exchange Server Archiver in October 2007 and carrying out an intensive 10-week research project alongside Colin. The conclusion was made that the tool would either deal with email archiving or monitoring. The decision was taken to create an Archiver; Rob recalled Richard Mitchell, the Project Manager, infamously asking, “how hard can it be?!”
The answer was a long way up the Mohs Hardness scale; it took 18 months to get the tool to the stage it is at today. The first Beta version was announced at 2008 TechEd, which later performed a vital role in unearthing aspects of the tool that needed to be modified to meet the high usability standards at Red Gate. Features of the Exchange Server Archiver were beginning to take shape, until it took on its present three-component design: A component which talks to Exchange, a component that stores the data, and a third which serves it to the client. This architecture allowed the product to be very easily scaled, so that it can be licensed by the number of users.
In April 2009, a pre-release was put out. The team determined the TechEd 2009 event as a deadline for release. “No matter how many coffee machines, bars of chocolate and Red Bulls we’d get through, we would be ready to ship by Tech Ed”.
This year’s TechEd began on 11th May, 5 days after the product launch. For all the team, the launch was a cause for great satisfaction at the achievement. Both Colin and Rob had reasons to celebrate. The initial idea for the product had come from Colin, before he was even officially a Red Gate employee, and Rob had worked on the project for over a year and a half. Both therefore wanted to be the first to buy a license for the product. Colin attempted to show his dedication to Exchange Server Archiver with the product logo tattooed on his arm, albeit in marker pen. However it is by Rob’s desk that you see the invoice pinned on the wall, following the tossing of a coin.
What struck me most about the project, as a newcomer to Red Gate, was the single-minded dedication, and pride in the achievement, that was shared by the whole team. It was evidently a tense moment for everyone waiting to see how Exchange Administrators and SysOps reacted to the new tool, and great relief at the positive feedback from attendees at TechEd, and from the users of the release version of the tool. The Exchange Server Archiver is continuing to be well received, believe me. No, come to think of it, don’t take my word for it but, have a read of the testimonials and download a trial to make up your own mind and let us know what you think. While you’re there, why not enter the quiz for the chance to win a 5 mailbox license of ESA.
Post by Alice Smith.