E-Mail - Strategic Or What?

Market Wire, 20050229

Ottawa software developer EDUCOM released Exchange Archive Solution (EAS) 2.0b (BETA) for MS Exchange. Clients that register will be able to download EAS 2.0b (BETA) for a 60 day no cost with no commitment free trial (www.educom.on.ca/download.htm). Only those organizations that register and are accepted as official Beta test sites will be eligible for incentive pricing. EAS 2.0 (Production Version) will be released 1 October 2000.

"We are very excited about the ground-breaking features our development team has been able to incorporate into this release." says EDUCOM's CEO Andrew Moffat. Moffat went on to state "EAS 1.0's features were 6 months ahead of the competition. EAS 2.0 is 12 months ahead of anything that is out there." Tom Dobaj, EDUCOM's Director of Product Development, states "EAS 2.0b has been designed to offer organizations a truly enterprise solution. We fully support Windows/MS Exchange 2000 and we have expanded our supported SQL databases to include Oracle. In addition, we will continue to support the previous versions of MS Exchange."

By industry standards, "Exchange Archive Solution" is extremely inexpensive, considering it is a robust enterprise solution with an enormous amount of advanced technological features. "A number of our clients were really surprised when they tested EAS. Based on the price they thought it was going to be a utility, they had no idea about the degree of sophistication and innovation incorporated into the product" says Dobaj. "We want market share. Our early adopters have gained an significant benefit from the low introductory price. Our introductory pricing was intended to be very aggressive. The pricing has been instrumental in us gaining a foothold in this particular niche market." says Moffat. Dobaj went on to state "the introductory pricing will remain in effect during the beta period, however, our regular pricing will come into effect with the release of the EAS 2.0 production version 1 October 2000." Moffat continued "Be assured, the regular price for EAS will continue to be aggressive by industry standards. The price of EAS will always make it easy for organizations to make the correct decision."

What is Exchange Archive Solution (EAS):

EAS is a hot new enterprise intelligent storage management software. EAS has been designed to manage the movement of e-mail from on-line, to near-line, then to off-line storage and if requested to restore it quickly and efficiently. EAS has a powerful internal script language that enables organizations to customize archive rules down to the user level. The script language further enables mail administrators to set priorities on policy. EDUCOM believes that the archive script provides the type of flexibility that is required. The different requirements that each organization, group and classification has makes a shrink wrapped archive solution inadequate. EAS is a fresh and innovative solution that is essential for any organization wanting to take a major leap towards building an infrastructure to support knowledge based decision making.

Another interesting and valuable feature is EAS Estimator. EAS Estimator enables the organization to collect and understand information about the mail that resides on one, many or all of the production mail servers. In addition to the standard information that this tool provides (e.g. Number of messages, average size, growth over time, number of attachments) clients have been able to use the information to determine load leveling of clients between mail stores. This reduces the number of duplicate mail messages between servers (mail stores). This is essential with MS Exchange 2000, where servers can support multiple mail stores.

EAS was originally designed to operate within the Microsoft Back Office Architecture. EAS works with any MS Exchange server, regardless of platform. "As an enterprise solution many of our largest clients identified the requirement to work with Oracle." says Dobaj, With the release of EAS 2.0, in addition to MS SQL, we fully support Oracle as the backend SQL database." EAS allows organizations to retain messages with attachments by archiving them to a central repository in a secure and compressed state. The messages and their associated attachments can then effortlessly be retrieved by the end user from his desktop, or restored by the mail administrator. The following link will lead you to all of the information pertaining to the software: www.educom.on.ca/prd_eas.htm

The EDUCOM team understands that it cannot afford to rest on its laurels. In March there were only three players claiming to have offerings in this market. Today this number has more than doubled. "We are pleased to see the entry of these players" says Moffat, "This growth indicates we have made the right decision and are in a market that meets the evolving demands of the client base. As we fight for market share I am confident that the user community will benefit. Education, competitive pricing and feature advancement will be the key benefits to the client. EDUCOM's continuing challenge will be to utilize all of our experience with document/records management and litigation support to ensure we are feature rich, scalable, open and robust."