If you could design an Exchange email archiver from scratch, what would you do differently and how would you bring it to maturity? Bob Cramblitt talks with three principals from the new Exchange Server Archiver 3.0 development team and gets the inside story on the soul of a new archiver.

The interviewees:

• Rob Chipperfield, lead developer for ESA 3.0
• Jon Boardman, user-experience specialist
• Nigel Morse, developer for ESA 3.0

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Cramblitt:

Red Gate is relatively new to Exchange server archiving, having come out with your first version of Exchange Server Archiver just over a year ago. A lot of good companies have been working on archivers for a while. What does Red Gate bring to the table that’s different?

Chipperfield:

Coming to the gate later, we started with a clean slate. We could look at the problem without being burdened by a previous architecture or any past decisions that didn’t turn out correctly. We’ve concentrated on the user-experience side of things. A lot of archivers can technically get data out of Exchange, but don’t show much concern for the poor users who have to manage emails daily.

Cramblitt:

How do you define the often-vague notion of “user experience”?

Boardman:

We do intensive research with administrators on how they work: what the pain points are and what tools they use. We sketch design ideas and from the very beginning we share our work with the people we got those ideas from in the first place. Once we are on the right track, it’s a constant iterative process of using our design skills and then testing those designs with real people. Eventually, we’ll start doing live tests where we watch people using the tools in remote sessions and see where they succeed and where they fail.

Chipperfield:

We take the approach that anybody should be able to download this product, try it out, and immediately have the power to manage it themselves.

Morse:

We’ve focused on ease of use not just from the administrator’s side – easy to install, easy to configure, easy to deploy – but from the end-user’s side, where it is a transparent experience. End users wanting to get at their email won’t have to worry about how it’s archived; it just appears.

Cramblitt:

But don’t all companies do this?

Boardman:

We go way beyond what other companies do. Not only do we do usability testing, we keep on doing usability testing. That doesn’t mean we got it wrong; we’re trying to constantly refine and get to a level of quality – a level of perfection – that we’re happy with.

Chipperfield:

At Red Gate, when users make a mistake, it’s not them making a mistake. It’s the system that can be improved. It should be so obvious what to do that users should never get into the situation where they make a mistake and don’t know what to do about it.

Cramblitt:

What specific improvements have you made from V2 to V3 of Exchange Server Archiver?

Morse:

Performance. We completely rewrote the code that talks to the actual server under the hood. Before we relied on a third-party component for that process. We gained a lot of understanding about how Exchange servers work. We got in there with an in-house profiler and found out where the bottlenecks were, tweaked them, and got a lot more speed out of the whole system.

Chipperfield:

We also added the ability to split off and link archive stores. This was originally introduced as way of allowing people to be able to use different forms of storage, but it turns out to be a massive performance win as well.

Boardman:

The other big development is Exchange 2010 support. Users told us they want this and they’re excited about it. Even though there are archiving capabilities in Exchange 2010, people have told us they want a more complete archiving solution running alongside it.

Cramblitt:

Tell us more about that. Why would a sysadmin want to go beyond the so-called personal archiving provided in Exchange 2010?

Chipperfield:

A lot of that goes back to the user experience. Microsoft is trying to solve problems with PST files not getting backed up, not being centrally located, not being very accessible. They concentrated on the PST experience without considering whether people really want that experience. They are solving some of the problems of PSTs, but not dealing with the reasons they exist in the first place.

Morse:

It’s like an online PST rather than a transparent archiving solution.

Cramblitt:

So what’s your PST solution?

Boardman:

We have a PST Importer tool. First, it searches for PST files on the administrator’s domain, providing information on where they are, who’s got them, how many there are, and how big they are. Then, the sysadmin has the option of importing those messages out of PST files into Exchange Server Archiver 3.0. Later on in the year, we’ll be providing the ability to import into Exchange 2010 as well.

Chipperfield:

We’re providing a complete solution, from discovery of PSTs to bringing them into the archiver so you can completely remove the problems associated with PSTs.

Cramblitt:

There’s been controversy about the use of stubbing, often alluding to a 2007 white paper from Microsoft. Do you use stubbing in Exchange Server Archiver 3.0?

Chipperfield:

Yes, in the form of a placeholder. There’s a lot of fud about stubbing, but mostly about its use in the first generation of archivers. In older products, you saw the stub and if you wanted to see the message you’d have to do another mouse click that would take you to another application to view the message. That did detract from the user experience. It’s different in Exchange Server Archiver 3.0 – as far as the user is concerned, it’s just a normal message.

Morse:

The placeholder looks just like a normal message and allows you to get to your mail wherever it is without any extra effort. When you click on it, the email is automatically retrieved from the archive and displayed in Outlook just like any other message. Users don’t see the difference.

Cramblitt:

So Exchange Server Archiver 3.0 is out there and people are using it. Is your work done for a while?

Chipperfield:

Well, we got to go down to the pub and celebrate, but now we’re back at it. We have support for Exchange Server 2010 in this release and Office 2010 is on the cusp, so we need to work on bringing the full transparency experience to Outlook 2010.

Morse:

We don’t get much rest. We need to get the PST importer inside Exchange 2010.

Boardman:

We also just released Exchange Mailbox Sizer, a free tool that allows you to analyze size, structure and age of your Exchange data and determine how much you might be able to save by archiving. Beyond that, keep watching this space because we are really committed to developing tools that make a sysadmin’s life easier.

You can get a free 30-day trial of Exchange Server Archiver 3.0 here.