In April, Microsoft announced that Exchange 2010 will have built-in support for archiving. But it’s not clear to many what capabilities Microsoft will provide. This Ferris Research white paper sheds light on the new offering. Topics include what the product’s archiving features do, what they don’t do, and what the ongoing role of third-party archiving vendors will be.

Just about anybody with an email address knows about spam and spam filters—or at least they think they do. However, it is a complex subject, with far more to it than meets the eye. This Ferris Research white paper looks at spam: what it is, how it is sent, and how it is filtered. It unravels the complexities and gives an accessible, factual overview into the scourge of spam.

Email archiving can be implemented by subscribing to a hosted service, commonly called “software as a service” (SaaS), or by licensing software and installing it in-house. Which approach is better? Sometimes the choice is clear; more often it is not, and a potential customer must balance trade-offs.

This Ferris Research white paper explains the main differences between the two approaches so IT executives can decide which is best for their organizations. It also contains an interview with Mimecast, a SaaS provider, on the advantages of SaaS and how it is evolving.

This report looks at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Microsoft-based UC. As the report shows, the TCO of Microsoft UC and telephony benefits from economies of scale. It is much easier for a large organization to justify the technology than a smaller organization. A spreadsheet to help you model your organization’s TCO is also provided.

This report describes the results of a survey of 136 organizations, totaling about 1.5 million mailboxes, to determine the extent that organizations have deployed their email vendor’s instant messaging (IM) services. We discuss the penetration of the vendors’ IM services for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise, and further break down the data based on organization size. The data is valuable for organizations that want to compare the size and cost of their email support staffs with those of comparably sized organizations, as well as for vendors seeking to assess the penetration of internally supported IM technology.

This report looks at Ensim Unify, a system management framework that offers a layer of insulation, protecting the management of mission-critical infrastructure applications—such as Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory (AD), and mobility gateways such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and Windows Mobile. The key idea behind Unify is to automate the day-to-day administration of these applications by wrapping their administrator interfaces so it can bundle sets of commands into single, task-focused operations.

This report describes the results of a survey of 136 organizations, totaling about 1.5 million mailboxes, to determine the size and cost of their email support staffs. We discuss the annual cost per mailbox of providing technical support for Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes/Domino, and Novell GroupWise, and further break down the data based on organization size. The data is valuable for organizations that want to compare the size and cost of their email support staffs with those of comparably sized organizations.

Kazeon’s Information Access Platform discovers, classifies, and indexes most of an organization’s electronically stored information (ESI) and then makes it easy to search for relevant information sets and apply control policies. This report describes Kazeon’s offering and details its industry context.

A growing proportion of lawsuits require the production of copies of electronically stored information. IT staff must now provide timely assistance in producing the data. This new responsibility is typically extremely disruptive to IT staff, and also very expensive. This report reviews the state of current U.S. federal laws relating to electronic discovery, explains the problems that have arisen, and summarizes current thinking on relevant best practices. We focus on the perspective of IT staff and the actions they should undertake.

This free report is an excerpt from our 89-page report describing the results of a survey to determine organizations’ email product usage. The 917 organizations that responded provided information about the email systems they are using, the versions deployed, migration plans, and the cost of the software. The excerpt explains the survey methodology, provides the questions asked, and presents an overview of the findings.

This report describes the results of a survey of 917 organizations of all sizes to determine the email systems they are using, the versions deployed, migration plans, and the cost of the software. Responding organizations account for 10.6 million employees, or roughly 2% of the workforce in developed industrialized economies.

This report discusses classifications and why they are important. Automated methods of assigning classifications must be used, complemented by limited use of manual assignment. The report explains how the different approaches work and their shortcomings. Finally, it explains the main challenges faced by user organizations and vendors serving user organizations.

In this report, we describe the main issues of concern to email support staff implementing Exchange Server 2007. The report incorporates data from a survey of 43 organizations that are migrating to Exchange 2007. We describe their deployment plans and the different ways they are configuring their new systems.

Virus and other email-borne threats have become more prevalent and more dangerous than ever before. This report outlines current methods used by authors of these threats and discusses techniques to control them.

In this brief, we describe Socialtext’s wiki designed for business use and discuss its industry context.