e-Mail has transformed from being just a communication tool to being a mission critical business application for most organizations. Most businesses identify e-mail as being their primary method of communications with clients and vendors, as well as the corporate standard for internal communications.

As e-mail has grown in popularity and usage, so have the growth in e-mail messages being stored on servers. Some organizations have limited message storage by automatically forcing employees to delete emails once their mailboxes reach a specific limit (like 50mb or 100mb in size). Other organizations have e-mail messages automatically deleted when they reach a certain age (like 6-months old, or 1-yr old).

However in this day and age of regulatory requirements, the deletion of e-mail messages is actually forbidden by law. e-Mails are considered business records and are regulated by SEC, FDA, and other regulatory agencies. Organizations now must keep certain e-mail messages for 3-yrs, 7-yrs, 10-yrs, or longer. The archiving and retention of messages can be done manually by each employee in an organization, or an archiving and message retention tool can be installed and enabled enterprise wide, thus allowing the centralization and administration of messages.

Convergent Computing has partnered with several organizations (such as Symantec Enterprise Vault, Mimosa Systems, CommVault, HP, and the like) that have tools that provide e-mail archiving and message retention from a messaging server perspective, appliance perspective, client system perspective, or system gateway perspective.

Services the CCO provides around e-mail archiving and message retention:

• Review an organization's existing email retention and archiving policies
• Evaluate whether the organization's current policy meets the regulatory requirements of the organization
• Make recommendations on how other organizations in similar environments addressed their e-mail archiving and message retention policies
• Provide recommendations on the appropriate product or tool to meet the needs of the organization
• Assist in the implementation of an archiving and retention tool for the organization
• Provide cross-training and administration training on the ongoing support and management of the e-mail archiving and message retention tool appropriate for the organization