Cast your mind back a couple of decades and the topic of this article wouldn’t have ever been considered. The rate in which emails have expanded over recent years is beyond extraordinary; every day hundreds of billions of emails are sent and suffice to say, this figure doesn’t look like dropping.
In fact, it’s only going to rise considerably. This also means that more of our systems are getting clogged up, as IT departments across the world aim to slash the amount of space that e-mails are consuming.
This has paved the way for efficient email archiving solutions to enter the market. As is the case with any new type of software, these bring umpteen different features. Some are going to be completely relevant for your business, while others will be utterly redundant. Let’s now take a look at the most efficient features within these solutions, to help you and your business develop further.
Is the archiving solution going to be compatible with your existing platform?
Some would argue that this first element isn’t even a feature, but regardless of your views on this it’s incredibly important.
A lot of email archiving solutions sit outside of traditional email platforms. This means that there needs to be a degree of compatibility, which ensures that the two work in tangent and guarantee that all emails are accessible for you.
Some people will just opt to use the basic archiving system that’s associated with their existing platform, but this appears to be a case of “settling” for potentially second best. Instead, simply make sure that the archiver is going to work with all the mainstream platforms, with Microsoft Office, Google Mail and IMail being some of the most popular.
Once you’ve overcome this hurdle, you can progress to tackle other features.
Can you search through emails?
At the moment, you can log into your email client and comfortably search through emails. As soon as you link up your archiving system with it, such a feature doesn’t necessarily exist. Some of the simpler programs won’t allow this and considering the fact that you have probably whittled down thousands of emails into your archive, this is a major drawback.
In short, you desperately need a search function. It needs to be a system where you, with limited IT knowledge, can quickly initiate and find your email of choice. Not only this, but it needs to be fast. Again, there are going to be thousands of emails in there, potentially more, so results need to be provided at lightning speeds to keep things as efficient as possible.
Scrutinize the resiliency
Each archiving solution is probably going to arrive with a resiliency rating. Even if this is set at 99.999%, you’ll still lose 1 in every 100,000 objects through corruption.
For some people, this might be acceptable. However, you should be looking to get as high a percentage as possible and ensure that the chances of losing data are as low as can be.
