EAS - The High Availability Problem Solver For MS Exchange

Market Wire, 20050229

Ottawa software developer EDUCOM released its newest production version of Exchange Archive Solution (EAS) for MS Exchange - EAS 2.0Release Candidate (RC). Clients that register, at the EDUCOM web site (www.educom.on.ca), will be able to download EAS 2.0 documentation, as well as a recent survey: "E-Mail - Strategic or What?". Clients that identify a desire to test EAS 2.0(RC) will be contacted to arrange a 60 day no cost with no commitment free trial.

EAS is a solution that acts as a multiplier for the organization's investment in MS Exchange. EAS focuses on making the house keeping activities transparent so that MS Exchange can focus on providing the organization with advanced business communications. The growth of E-mail, the increased understanding of its importance, and its dominance as the primary communications tool, suggests that its management must be given priority and occur from creation to its disposition. With the release of EAS 2.0 EDUCOM has expanded the utility of EAS to include EAS as the "high availability problem solver" for MS Exchange.

"The EAS 2.0b (Beta) program was a resounding success." says EDUCOM's CEO, Andrew Moffat, "Over 400 companies world wide registered to downloaded EAS 2.0 (Beta). From these 400 we received active feedback from approximately 63%. In addition to the expected code issues, associated with any beta period, we also received accolades with regard to the approach we were taking with the product." Moffat continued, "we are very excited about the groundbreaking features our development team has been able to incorporate into this release. With so much interaction with production users, we were able to identify user requirements that were important to the majority." Tom Dobaj, EDUCOM's Director of Product Development, states "Our clients identified that they required a solution that would ensure their MS Exchange mail would be available at all times, regardless of geographic location. They all view e-mail as a mission critical business application. That is the reason that EAS 2.0 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."

Moffat went on to say "we are extremely proud of the effort made by the entire development team. Essential Computing, our UK distributor, sent people to participate in the QA and documentation process." Dobaj continued, "Essential was committed to working with us to ensure that, when we had to prioritize the addition of new features, their clients' business requirements were fully understood and represented. During the Beta program we really listened to what our clients wanted. The clients I spoke to said they found our attitude and responsiveness to their requirements to be refreshing." In the end, the new features added 15,000 lines of C++ code.

EAS is definitely the high availability problem solver for MS Exchange. Unlike other solutions, EAS does not impose on the MS Exchange Servers and ensures that all corporate MS Exchange mail messages and their associated attachments are captured, stored, secured, accessible (to those authorized), retrievable, and life cycle managed. This is done transparently to the end user, regardless of geographic location. Some of the EAS features which assure high availability for MS Exchange include, but are not limited to:

1. the architecture for EAS (MS Exchange 5.5/2000 & Windows NT 4/2000 compliant): a. EAS Server, b. MS IIS Server, c. MS Site Server, d. MS SQL (EAS also supports Oracle), and SAN/NAS; 2. EAS does not run any components (incl DLLs) on the MS Exchange Server; 3. EAS uses MS Outlook/MS Exchange login security to authenticate to EAS services; 4. as an option (recommended) messages are not removed from the MS Exchange store until EAS is informed that the message has been backed-up with secondary storage (tape, optical, etc). Once EAS is informed that the message has been backed up, then it removes the message from the MS Exchange server; 5. a single instance of EAS: a. will archive multiple MS Exchange Servers, b. can archive approximately 100 messages per second (independent of size), and c. will ensure single instance storage when migrating from multiple message instances residing across multiple mail stores (increased redundancy is likely with MS Exchange 2000 and its ability to support multiple mail stores on a single MS Exchange Server); 6. mail messages are stored in Microsoft's open .MSG format; 7. messages are compressed using an open compression utility (approx 50%+); 8. mail messages still available (transparently) to users through MS Outlook, or the EAS Web Client; 9. restores are completed in minutes: a. individual messages, b. folders, and/or c. mailboxes; 10. bulk restores can be done much faster than tape; 11. restores can be done to the same client or to another client (i.e. individual leaves position and new incumbent requires business relevant e-mail. The previous mail can be restored to the incumbent's mail store); 12. EAS' scripting language enables multiple policies to be put into place. Policies can be prioritized to ensure that intellectual property is protected or capacity concerns are dealt with. Scripting language also enables organizations to restrict certain folders from archiving. This ensures that individuals can have a reasonable expectation of privacy; 13. permissions tab - ability to share archives - EAS allows archives to be shared among specified users. This is achieved centrally by the administrator. Permissions can be added on a per user or per group basis. With EAS'advanced permissions, shared archives can be established with two way/one way access. These advanced permission models can allow archives to be shared, or monitored (if necessary); Additionally end-users can give other users permissions to their mail folders, by applying access rights in MS Outlook, which are subsequently recognized in EAS; 14. distribution lists - EAS stores a record of what users, at what particular times, belong to each distribution list. Keeping a record of what recipients belong to each distribution list is valuable to those who need to track recipients of certain messages; 15. full text search and retrieval - EAS, using the power of MS Site Server, allows a user to perform full text queries on his/her archived e-mail. EAS works closely with the permissions to display a list of mailboxes a user can perform queries on. Users may wish to perform searches on multiple mailboxes they have access to with just one query. Searches can be performed on any combination of the following: recipient, sender, date, subject, or contents of the message using Boolean logic, phrases, key words, or "inflections of" specific words; and 16. public folders - EAS' security settings with archived public folders are synchronized with MS Exchange's security settings. The archived public folder distribution list permissions are based on MS Outlook's permissions. EAS allows public folders to be indexed for full text search and retrieval capabilities.