Red Earth Software has introduced Policy Patrol Archiver, a new email archiving and eDiscovery (electronic discovery) solution for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) using Microsoft Exchange Server.

The company claims Policy Patrol Archiver now allows SMBs to meet compliancy needs, reduce Exchange store size, and boost Exchange performance without breaking the bank. Policy Patrol Archiver automatically stores emails in a centralised archive location, allowing administrators to set email retention policies and meet email archiving requirements. Emails are archived into the database instantly, so that even if a user deletes an email, it will still be archived into the database. Users can search and restore their emails through a web browser.

Companies in nearly every industry are now recognizing the importance of email archiving due to government regulations and evolving best practices in IT administration.

“Although SMBs are becoming more and more aware of the importance of archiving their data, most have not yet implemented an archiving solution because current offerings are simply too expensive or too complicated to implement and manage,” said Mike Spykerman, CEO of Red Earth Software. “Policy Patrol Archiver now offers a solution that is affordable and manageable for companies of any size.”

“In order to reduce the Exchange Server load, a common practice is to ask employees to delete emails before their mailbox reaches a certain size,” Spykerman added. “Although this might result in a smaller Exchange Information Store, asking employees to simply delete emails indiscriminately is not a good solution for eDiscovery purposes. The company will have no control over which emails are deleted and which are kept, and if asked to produce emails on a court order, will have a hard time explaining why some emails can be found and others not. A much better approach is to automatically move emails of a certain age off the Exchange Server into a central database, where emails can be stored/purged according to company retention policies.”

Policy Patrol Archiver reduces the Exchange Information Store size by automatically stubbing messages (i.e., replacing the body of the message with a link to the message in the archive), or removing messages entirely from the Exchange Information Store. In doing so, Policy Patrol Archiver decreases Exchange backup and restore times, and boosts Exchange Server performance.

Emails and attachments are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database and can be searched and viewed through a web interface. Messages can be removed from the Exchange Information Store, or replaced by a ‘message stub’ with a link to the email in the archive. A 30-day evaluation version can be downloaded from: http://www.policypatrol.com.