http://www.ferris.com Analysts specializing in messaging & collaboration Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:59:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In December, we published a bulletin titled Cost of Exchange 2010 Storage Not An Issue. This said that storage is now so cheap that Exchange 2010 users needn't worry about storage costs. We still subscribe largely to that view. However, it's not true for organizations that are committed to storage area ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/03/04/exchange-2010-san-costs-are-significant/ Hosted Exchange vendor Intermedia has added integrated telephony to its offering. The focus is on sales to SMBs, up to around 1,000 seats. Thoughts:      Hitherto the offering has consisted of email, IM, fax, and SharePoint.      This is the first time we've heard of a hosted email offering providing integrated telephony.      Telephony ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/03/03/intermedia-hosted-exchange-adds-telephony/ This is the first of a series of bulletins on important features of Exchange archiving, namely: single instance storage, retention management, PST management, mailbox size, multi-mailbox search, and item-level restore. Beginning with Exchange 2010, many small and medium-size organizations may find that sufficient features are included, so that third-party archiving ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/03/02/exchange-2010-archiving-1-no-sis/ Hosted archiving vendor LiveOffice is expanding its supported data types. Hitherto, it has mainly archived Exchange email, with some instant messaging. As of March 2, LiveOffice is also archiving SharePoint teamspaces and Web site pages. The Web site support implies support for social networking Web sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/03/02/more-media-types-for-liveoffice/ Last Friday (February 19), the chattering classes were gossiping about how cloud archiving vendor Smarsh had its Web site and phone lines down. Had the company suddenly gone down the toilet? Everything was in fact OK. The company's Ken Anderson told us:      We had technical issues this morning that created some ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/02/24/smarsh-outage-small-fire-no-one-hurt/ Iron Mountain announced it has acquired Mimosa Systems. This puts an end to over a year of rumors concerning Mimosa’s acquisition discussions with a number of possible suitors. Iron Mountain has a vested interest in building bridges between customer on-premise deployments and its Digital Archive, and the company has been building ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/02/23/iron-mountain-acquires-mimosa/ Anti-spam vendor Cloudmark announced it has acquired Bizanga, which provides messaging software for service providers. Comments:      Helps Cloudmark offer a fuller messaging solution to service providers. That makes sense.      Bizanga executed well in a very difficult, highly competitive market.      It succeeded in getting some major, high-visibility clients, including Cox Communications.      Bizanga ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/02/18/cloudmark-acquires-bizanga/ The Experts Conference has a very deep technical lineup of Exchange sessions planned. The event is April 25-28 in Los Angeles. I will be conference chair again this year. The agenda includes: An opportunity to sound off on what you like and don’t like about Exchange Server, and where you think Microsoft ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/02/11/deep-exchange-event-the-experts-conference-april-la/ Exchange 2010 includes archiving and e-discovery; these need powerful indexing capabilities. Third-party on-premise archiving vendors struggle constantly with indexing technologies. Indices get corrupt and take days or weeks to regenerate. Searches return results that aren't as expected, or aren't understood. Indexing technologies age, and when a vendor replaces them, your corporate ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/01/12/exchange-2010-indexing-good-enough-for-e-discovery/ The single most important technology change of our time is happening around the cloud. Entire industries are being changed or made obsolete. The world as we know it is changing fast. Examples of what has changed:      Paper-based maps and manual navigation have been replaced with cloud-based maps and GPS systems.      Photography ... http://www.ferris.com/2010/01/10/the-decade-ahead-cloud-revolution/ We're hearing a series of rumors that something is going badly wrong at Dell/MessageOne. Eg:      They've lost a huge amount of customer archived email over the past couple of weeks      Many customers are making inquiries about other vendors and their ability to ingest/absorb their historic archive data      One vendor told ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/18/messageone-rumors-something-rotten-in-denmark/ There are three big players in the professional networking business: LinkedIn, Viadeo, and Xing. LinkedIn is best known in the United States. But France's Viadeo and Germany's Xing are important competitors. Viadeo recently paid us a visit. The company's focus is on Europe and emerging economies. It has 25 million ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/16/viadeo-professional-networking/ If you care about compliance, the "Drafts" folder in your Inbox needs to be archived. Archiving vendors take several approaches to email archiving. Some access mailboxes via MAPI and pull items out into the archive. Others intercept SMTP traffic and journal a copy into the archive. Others copy the database transaction ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/14/archiving-drafts-folder-important-for-compliance/ Exchange 2010's database strategy is very interesting. The new Database Availability Groups and the benefits they offer for data protection and quick recovery are striking. Overall, Microsoft is optimistic that mailboxes will be able to grow to 10GB or more. However, it's unclear how large mailboxes will perform in practice. Several ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/08/exchange-2010-niggling-fears-about-storage-requirements/ Charmingly named YippieMove helps you migrate email from one message store to another. It's mainly aimed at small businesses and consumers, who are using a cloud-based service. Easy to use, $14.95/mailbox. It's just IMAP-IMAP email, no address book or calendar migration services. No, it doesn't even migrate Notes apps. ... David Ferris http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/06/inter-imap-server-migration/ Archiving vendor Mimosa has recently had a couple of small financings: $3M of equity in June, 2009 $4M of debt in November, 2009 Mimosa has never made a profit, and the recession of course has made fund-raising harder. We understand an IPO was deferred due to poor results. We understand, too, that Mimosa ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/03/mimosa-funding-challenges/ NOTE OF DECEMBER 9: THIS IS BEING REVISED PER READER FEEDBACK. WE UNDERESTIMATED THE NEED FOR THE USE OF EXPENSIVE STORAGE. FURTHER INPUT WELCOMED Concern is sometimes expressed about the cost of Exchange 2010 storage: Users will have large mailboxes. 5GB to 20GB will be common. Take 10GB as a typical figure, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/03/cost-of-exchange-storage-not-an-issue/ Whistleblower website Wikileaks recently leaked more than half a million text messages around 9/11. We hesitate to even link to the story, but if you must read it, you can find CNN's coverage here. There is something sacred about the last messages exchanged with a spouse before a loved one dies. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/02/ethics-privacy-and-e-discovery/ A highly publicized hack into the email server at a prominent client-research center highlights one of the problems with email evidence. It is far too easy to take things out of context. In this case, over a thousand emails were taken and posted publicly. This has resulted in numerous accusations of ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/12/01/context-critical-to-email-evidence/ There are different approaches to sharing documents, where a group of people want to be able to make comments on a document and alter it. One approach is Track-Changes, which we're all familiar with in MS Word. This is very useful. But then, after three or four sets of changes, it ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/30/different-approaches-to-editing-documents/ Conferencing technology--such as Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Live Meeting--has two approaches to the audio element. You can route it over the data network, or you can route it over the conventional telephone system ("PSTN" or "Public Switched Telephone Network"). In principle, it's much better to treat the audio as just another ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/24/conferencing-and-pstn-use-for-audio/ Today, PC-based conferencing vendors such as Cisco, IBM/Lotus, and Microsoft tend to focus on PC-centric innovation. Eg., support for multi-person video cameras, integration with PBXs, integration with desktop applications. However, I think the biggest innovations, starting perhaps in 2012, will be found among mobile phones. These will have sufficient bandwidth and ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/22/mobiles-will-be-the-locus-of-conferencing-innovation/ Desktop sharing is a useful component of conferencing technology. Its main uses are:      Document sharing, so people can work on spreadsheets, word processing documents, and so on, at the same time      Informal peer-to-peer help desks and training. Where you show someone how to do something ... David Ferris PS. I'm not sure ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/19/desktop-sharing-use-cases/ Cloudemail101.org is a useful website that compares cloud-based email offerings. Cloud archiving vendor LiveOffice is behind it. ... David Ferris P.S. Sometimes concision is a virtue. http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/18/site-evaluates-cloud-messaging-offerings/ For the last 10 years, the electronic conferencing world has tended to focus on high-end solutions such as those from Polycom. Think of special conference rooms, expensive WAN links, special equipment, and so on. Over the last five years, PC-based solutions have been evolving. IBM/Lotus has been an innovator. Microsoft has ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/17/cisco-microsoft-will-be-the-big-conferencing-players/ Here's an update on the law suit between ZL Technologies and Gartner. By way of background, in October email archiving vendor ZL Technologies filed a law suit against Gartner asking for $1.7B in damages caused in part by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The story is very interesting from several points of ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/15/judge-dismisses-zl-suit/ Cloud archiving vendor LiveOffice announced it now supports most of the important cloud-based email offerings:      123Together      AppRiver      Apptix      Azaleos      Cisco WebEx Mail      Google Apps (Premier)      groupSPARK      Intermedia      Microsoft Exchange Online      PanTerra Networks      USA.NET      Yahoo! Zimbra      Other POP/IMAP-based solutions      Personal Email Accounts (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live HotMail) This is quite ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/12/liveoffice-archiving-works-with-many-exchange-cloud-offerings/ Microsoft's SaaS versions of Exchange/SharePoint/OCS have been out for a year. Here are some updates: BPOS (the bundle of Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, and Live Meeting) has a million paid seats. Largest customer is Glaxo Smith Kline, with 100,000 seats. Microsoft continues to prefer to deliver via business partners. They get 12% of the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/10/bpos-update-new-pricing/ Today, November 9, Cisco is launching its email SaaS, Cisco WebEx Mail. This is important. The offering has a reasonable chance at giving Microsoft substantial competition in the messaging and collaboration space. In short: Can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007, or Outlook 2010 as rich client Cisco-provided web browser client also ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/09/cisco-launches-email-saas-cisco-webex-mail/ Many laws and regulations require that certain types of information be kept for specified periods. This is fueling the need for the archiving of information along with associated retention polices. Conflicting pressure comes from legal counsel, which wants information to be destroyed as quickly as possible to reduce exposure and the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/06/well-keep-most-electronic-material-forever/ When you define a retention policy, don't just impose on the archive. PSTs and tape backups are still lingering around. They are subject to e-discovery, and retrieving information from them can be extremely expensive and disruptive--far more so than with an archiving tool. Tapes and PSTs need to be disposed of within the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/05/delete-psts-and-tapes-within-retention-window/ Most organizations are unclear about the retention policies they should adopt. That slows the deployment of archiving technology. It usually makes sense to go ahead with archiving in advance of having decided one's retention policy; that is, start by archiving everything, for an indeterminate period. You still get many of the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/04/archive-today-but-defer-retention-policy/ I like all the Ferris webinars, but I am particularly interested in this week's topic on Exchange 2010 archiving. The date and time is November 4th, 8:30am Pacific Time Zone. You can register on the Ferris.com website, here. The reason I am looking forward to this webinar is the growing controversy ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/03/important-webinar-this-week-on-exchange-2010-archiving-controversy/ The archiving features of Exchange 2010 are attractive, and will be welcomed by most customers. However, Microsoft is sometimes overenthusiastic. For example, consider this Microsoft blog, by Julia White, director of Exchange marketing. Speaking of Exchange 2010, she says: "It archives and discovers... At a regional healthcare group, they are able ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/02/microsoft-oversells-e2010-archiving/ The old dumpster in Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 was valuable for recovering deleted email, but it had some basic compliance shortcomings. (Want more information on dumpster? See here.) It only contained deleted email, not deleted calendars or contacts. It was not indexed or searchable, and users were allowed to ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/30/new-dumpster-features-for-exchange-2010/ A growing number of businesses use Twitter for advertising. This recent Wall Street Journal article elaborates. It is very easy to sign up for a Twitter account, and it costs nothing. Each post has a maximum of 140 characters, so the message is very brief. To find a person or brand ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/28/business-uses-twitter/ The next major version of Exchange, Exchange 2010, introduces a valuable new concept called a Database Availability Group (DAG). A DAG is group of up to 16 mailbox servers that use continuous replication to update database copies, communicate to manage failures that affect individual databases, and can provide automatic recovery ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/28/exchange-2010-database-availability-groups/ In one word, BIG. The 2009 SharePoint Conference attracted over 7,000 paying attendees, making it one of the largest Microsoft events of 2009. This is remarkable when you compare it to the 2009 Microsoft TechEd event, which drew about the same number of attendees and covers all Microsoft solutions. The ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/27/observations-at-2009-sharepoint-conference/ Exchange 2010 offers some additional help for PST files in the form of a new Archive Mailbox. Archive Mailbox is an actual Exchange mailbox that is licensed, exists in the same Exchange database, and appears in Outlook alongside the primary mailbox. The seamless integration of Archive Mailbox with Exchange is ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/25/fixing-the-pst-problem-with-exchange-2010/ A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students to read each other's email. Read about it here. Imagine if your company and your competitor were both on Google. Now imagine stumbling across your competitor's inbox. Whoops! This underscores the importance of security whenever multitenancy is employed for email hosting. And it lends ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/23/google-bug-exposes-private-email/ Gartner's Magic Quadrant (MQ) for email archiving is not as scientific as Gartner would have you believe. According to ZL Technologies Inc. v. Gartner Group Inc. and Carolyn DiCenzo, ZL Technologies makes allegations of defamation, trade libel, false or misleading advertising, unfair competition, and negligent interference with prospective economic advantage against ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/21/zl-technologies-sues-gartner-over-archiving-magic-quadrant/ T-Mobile and Microsoft's Danger subsidiary recently apologized to Sidekick customers for losing their data. According to an Oct. 10th announcement, a recent outage on Microsoft/Danger systems caused loss of "contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, or photos" that are no longer on Sidekick devices. The likelihood of a successful recovery was put ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/21/t-mobile-and-microsoftdanger-users-affected-by-data-loss/ Email encryption will be greatly stimulated by the growing interest in cloud computing and in hosted messaging. One of the primary concerns of any enterprise considering an outsourced solution such as Exchange Online, Outlook Live, or Google Apps is around the security of the data that will end up hosted in ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/20/cloud-based-messaging-to-drive-email-encryption/ Sometimes the most successful business comes from out-of-the-box thinking. When it comes to hosted messaging services, many solution vendors take an entrapment approach. Win customers over to your solution, and then lock them in so that you can squeeze an annuity revenue stream from them: per mailbox per month pricing, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/18/give-customers-an-exit-strategy-from-hosted-messaging/ Microsoft recently unveiled the Technology Preview of Microsoft Outlook 2010, which includes a number of new technologies that dramatically increase end-user productivity. We will highlight three of our favorite features, namely Quick Steps, Clean Up, and Paste Options. Outlook "Quick Steps" can be accessed from a Quick Access Toolbar that sits ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/16/outlook-2010-dramatically-increases-end-user-productivity/ Employees at Boston's City Hall are in big trouble with email according to this Boston Globe article. It seems the common practice is to delete email daily to reduce mailbox load. At least this is the reason provided by one employee. But who forgot about public record laws which require ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/15/city-of-boston-ordered-to-preserve-email/ On October 19-22, the annual Microsoft SharePoint conference will be held in Las Vegas. The event has sold out, with 7,000 tickets sold. This makes the event almost as large as the annual Microsoft TechEd show. This year's SharePoint show promises to be exciting for two reasons. First, we will learn ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/14/sharepoint-conference-will-be-major-event/ eFolder recently completed its acquisition of the DoubleCheck Email Manager solution portfolio from Network Management Group. As interest in cloud computing continues to grow, more and more vendors are turning to managed service providers (MSPs) as a channel to reach hosted messaging customers. eFolder has historically provided white-labeled backup and archiving ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/12/efolder-acquires-doublecheck-email-manager/ Microsoft's Exchange Team in Redmond has released Exchange 2010 to manufacturing. As reported by John Fontana, there are already over 5 million production users running on Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 takes on several existing markets. Email archiving vendors will feel the impact of native archiving capabilities. SAN vendors will feel the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/09/exchange-2010-rtms-with-over-5-million-users-on-production/ Speech-to-text technology is nowhere near as good as many vendors claim. Often, operators are surreptitiously involved. According to this BBC article, one of the speech-to-text conversion companies--Spinvox--has been found to convert voicemail messages using human operators instead of "advanced speech recognition software." Patent filings by Spinvox reveal the depth of human ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/10/09/speech-to-text-technology-cruder-than-advertised/ We're hearing rumours that data leak prevention vendor Vericept is about to be sold to an accounting firm, with an announcement on September 15. Most DLP vendors have now been acquired. Eg McAfee bought Reconnex in 8/08, RSA/EMC bought Tablus in 8/07, Websense bought PortAuthority in 1/07. The market's been rather ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/09/08/vericept-sold/ Microsoft has released the Release Candidate for Exchange Server 2010. You can download it from this location. Before we share our perspectives, we'd like to hear your first impressions ... respond to this blog once you have kicked the tires on this new version of Exchange Server! ... David Sengupta http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/24/exchange-2010-release-candidate-available/ According to this recent statement from Microsoft, Exchange Server 2010 will not move to a SQL back-end. This confirms that a possible port from the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) to SQL has not simply been a rumor, while leaving the door open for future post-Exchange 2010 releases to use a SQL ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/17/microsoft-exchange-server-not-going-sql-back-end-for-now/ We hear from a usually reliable source, that:      Quest is discontinuing its eDiscovery module      There will be no additional development on the Archive Manager product      It is not clear, though, that the MAPI-based stubbing offering will be completely discontinued: at least not yet. Quest pulled itself out of the running ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/14/rumor-quest-withdraws-from-e-disco-de-emphasizes-archiving/ WebLOQ is an early-stages company offering end-to-end email encryption:      Allows users to send and receive encrypted emails.      Normally users have some special software installed on their machine. This works with almost all email clients including Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc.      An invitation system is being developed. If you send to ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/13/webloq-email-encryption/ A very high-level legal case has been in process in British Columbia, Canada, and exposes just how important email records are. See this article. In this case, the judge issued a statement asking for all email records pertaining to the case, no matter where they are located or if they exist ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/11/high-profile-government-case-exposes-risk-of-email-discovery/ Corporate espionage is the kind of thing most of us have read about in spy novels, but not something we regularly talk about in our IT planning sessions. Yet according to USA Today, corporate spying is more prevalent than we typically hear of, since most of its victims avoid the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/11/is-corporate-espionage-affecting-you/ Symantec's Enterprise Vault is the leading archiving product. This page contains information to help people evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. If you have experience with EV, please share your views on it. To do so, please post your response to the following survey questions as a comment. Or, if you want ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/10/symantec-enterprise-vault-strength-weaknesses/ Metalogix is offering SharePoint archiving, at no charge. Metalogix Archiving Express for SharePoint is a free tool. It provides hardware-independent hierarchical storage management and easy installation. No support is included beyond a user forum. At a later time, Metalogix will introduce a for-fee version with more bells and whistles. In the meantime, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/10/metalogix-offers-free-sharepoint-archiving/ Metalogix provides tools to help IT manage SharePoint content over its lifecycle. The tools import content into SharePoint, archive SharePoint content, and apply retention policies. Today's offerings are:      Professional Archive Manager. Provides archiving for SharePoint, Exchange, and file systems (products acquired from H&S in September 2008).      Archiving Express for Sharepoint ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/06/metalogix-sharepoint-content-lifecycle-management/ One of the interesting new concepts being introduced with Exchange 2010 is "Personal Archiving" vs. "Organizational Archiving." At the recent TechEd, a Microsoft instructor introduced personal archives as a means to reduce primary mailbox size and circumvent quotas without losing organizational control. In effect, personal archives are a new replacement for ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/06/exchange-2010-personal-archiving-vs-exchange-2010-organizational-archiving/ What's the size of the market for packaged archiving software? We estimate it at about $650 million annually. We expect it to grow at about 20% annually for the next few years. In short: 2009 revenues: $650M 2010 revenues: $780M 2011 revenues: $940M 2012 revenues: $1,125M 2013 revenues: $1,350m We estimate that the current market leader, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/04/the-size-of-the-archiving-market/ If you are considering Exchange 2010 for archiving, be aware of two factors that can increase the cost of, and delay, implementation:      The archiving features of Exchange 2010 require enterprise CALs. If you are not already using enterprise CALs, then you must pay the additional cost to upgrade.      To use ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/03/exchange-2010-archiving-hidden-costs/ According to this eWeek article, IT solution provider Sparxent has recently completed the acquistion of Cemaphore. Both companies are based in Salt Lake City. Cemaphore's core expertise has been around MAPI-based synchronization technologies, historically focused on its MailShadow continuous replication product. Over recent months Cemaphore has expanded its offerings to include ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/08/03/sparxent-acquires-cemaphore/ The latest versions of Windows allow for far greater scalability. Here's why. There are basically three ways to improve the compute performance of an IT platform:      Increase the clock speed of the processor.      Increase the number of processors--"scale up."      Increase the number of computers (processor/s + memory pairs)--"scale out." The above, of ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/22/microsoft-windows-now-scales-up-and-out-with-a-vengeance/ Google Wave was announced at the Google IO developers' conference in late May 2009. Quick Summary:      SaaS team workspace.      To give you a general idea, think of a souped-up/Web 2.0 Wiki or bulletin board. My colleague Steve Kille aptly called it a "bulletin board on steroids" under the hood.      Currently in ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/21/a-belated-take-on-google-wave/ Many of you may recall how, in the mid- to late-1990s, email was considered "a toy" in many companies. Technology was still evolving, the prominence of the Internet was still coalescing, and server-based email solutions such as Microsoft Exchange were still in their infancy. Consider the ever-present and even addictive ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/20/social-networking-and-the-enterprise/ In 2005, Microsoft acquired Frontbridge, one of the major providers of hosted email security services. When it launched the Microsoft-branded version of the service, it was named Exchange Hosted Services (EHS). At the time, we said this was confusing, because: It sounded as though it was a hosted ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/20/microsoft-finally-rebrands-hosted-security/ Google's recent announcement of a Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) represents another big stride in the ongoing Google Apps vs. Microsoft Exchange Online war that has been shaping up. Free for Google Apps Premier and Education customers, the Google Apps Connector will provide near-instant push of Gmail messages ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/16/google-apps-connector-for-blackberry-enterprise-server-announced/ Leading content control vendor Clearswift has gone rather quiet for the last couple of years. Here's a quick update. There are two products: Clearswift Email Appliance:      Software product, sometimes sold as appliance      Usually runs in VMware virtualized environment      Main functions:          Policy-based scanning and control          Policy-based encryption (can use ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/15/clearswift-update/ Since the early 1980s, Microsoft's success has been predicated on a tripartite strategy: Sell software, in volume, at about 20% of the incumbents' prices.      Engage third-party developers.      Use industry-standard hardware. These have clearly been the three keys to success for Microsoft -- although we can argue the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/14/microsofts-cloud-doesnt-have-a-silver-lining/ Ferris Research has learned that Microsoft recently made a quiet shuffle at the top of its Unified Communications and SharePoint businesses, placing Senior VP Kurt DelBene in charge of both R&D organizations. Under the new arrangement Rajesh Jha, Corporate VP Exchange and Office Live, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate VP Office ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/13/ucc-shuffled-under-microsofts-kurt-delbene/ Ferris recently had a briefing from Microsoft on the security of its Business Process Online Services (BPOS)--Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, etc. This presentation turned out to be of more interest to Ferris for its subtext than for the specifics it contained. The subtext was that Microsoft was encountering concern (pushback?) from ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/13/microsoft-online-standard-vs-dedicated-versions/ Ferris recently had a briefing from Microsoft on the security of its Business Process Online Services (BPOS) -- e.g., Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, etc. This presentation turned out to be of more interest to Ferris for its subtext than for the specifics it contained. The subtext was that Microsoft was encountering ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/08/microsoft-online-security-concerns/ AstraSync is a nice way to synchronize BlackBerries with Exchange:      Synchronizes email, calendar, contact information.      Synchronizes over the air using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol.      No need for the additional cost and complexity of BES servers.      No need for the RIM BlackBerry Desktop Manager.      Consumers synching with a POP/IMAP mailbox don't need ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/07/nice-blackberry-synching-with-mailsite-astrasync/ Exchange 2010 archiving is not the solution to everyone's archiving needs, and it is wrong to suggest that Microsoft sees it as such. Here's our understanding of how Microsoft views the situation:      Long-term, Exchange should be largely independent of the types of storage it uses.      Long-term, Exchange stores should be ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/07/exchange-2010-archiving-how-microsoft-sees-it/ Stories about lost email. This case involves the Governor of North Carolina, his wife, leading officials at North Carolina State University, and corruption. From an IT perspective, the following points are salient:      Although the matter is currently active, the email in question dates back to 2005. This raises the issue of ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/06/lost-email-and-dangers-of-adverse-judgments/ Here's an update on email and Web hygiene SaaS vendor MX Logic:      SaaS offering:          Virus/spam/malware control for email          Email archiving          Email disaster recovery/continuity          Web malware filtering      Main competition: Google/Postini and Symantec/MessageLabs.      Competitive strengths: value pricing, ease of installation and use, strong reseller ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/02/mx-logic-update/ SharePoint is a heavily browser-based experience. At times, that makes for a strange disconnect with one's desktop-based experience. The most egregious example is that of email. To get an email into SharePoint, you have to extract the message, such as by dragging and dropping it onto your desktop. That makes ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/07/02/colligo-contributor-provides-better-email-integration-with-sharepoint/ GTB Technologies makes a data leak prevention product called GTB Inspector. It's recently been revamped. Here's a summary:      Appliance dynamically scans all protocols and ports over a network link.      Can log/quarantine/block/redact offending material.      Policy-based encryption.      Also scans endpoints; e.g., for downloads to detachable USB drive.      Main competition: Symantec/Vontu, McAfee/Reconnex.      Does ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/30/gtb-inspector-data-leak-prevention/ AtMail offers an email appliance:      Provides POP/IMAP server, Webmail client, email archiving.      Linux-based with open standard components.      Pricing is a one-time license. Base product is $300; then per-user cost which is typically $0.10/user/year.      Appearance can be customized.      Professional services also available.      AtMail is privately held, with no external funding, and ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/30/atmail-extremely-inexpensive-email-appliance/ Exchange 2010 is the next version of Exchange Server. It is due for release at the end of 2009 or early 2010. Exchange 2010 includes many new features and enhancements for archiving. It's early days for Exchange built-in archiving, and storage management is an important area in which it falls short:      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/29/exchange-2010-archiving-storage-management-issues/ Google Wave, recently announced by Google and available later this year, is important for messaging. The launch presentation is worth viewing by anyone interested in messaging. Google Wave has an abstraction that seeks to replace both email and IM, and perhaps shared document editing too. Google argues that email was designed ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/26/google-wave-important-for-messaging/ LiveOffice (cloud-based archiving)and Mimosa (on-premises archiving) announced an interesting collaboration:      LiveOffice CloudMerge for Mimosa NearPoint lets Mimosa customers seamlessly push some or all of their on-premises archive into LiveOffice's cloud-based archive.      The upload-to-cloud interface is tightly integrated with that of Mimosa.      The pricing is proportional to the number of mailboxes ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/25/liveoffice-cloudmerge-for-mimosa-nearpoint-hybrid-on-prem-and-cloud-archiving/ If you have ever accidently deleted a document from SharePoint, then you know how difficult it is to restore a single item from SharePoint. The cause of this problem is that SharePoint has a relatively weak backup engine and it does not give you the option of performing single-file restores ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/24/help-for-sharepoint-item-level-recovery/ Red Gate's Exchange Server Archiver is a new email archiving product. It's strikingly easy to use:      Works with Exchange Server.      Outlook plugin.      Search is very simple and straightforward.      Main next elements of product roadmap are offline support and improved search.      Pricing is $30/mailbox for perpetual license, plus optional 25%/year maintenance.      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/23/red-gates-very-easy-to-use-archiving/ SMS spam on cellphone isn't much of a problem in developed countries, because senders get charged and it's too expensive for the spammer. However, that will change:      Spammers can send from developing countries where the charges are very low      Spammers will sometimes work out ways around the system, where the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/23/cloudmark-mobileauthority-controls-cellphone-malware/ At one time, it appeared likely that the SyncML protocol would be the main way that you'd synchronize email, calendar, and address book information with mobile phones. However, SyncML has problems handling unreliable links, and has a lot of variations between vendors. It hasn't taken off. In the shartphone world, Microsoft's ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/21/microsoft-activesync-the-future-of-mobile-phone-synchronization/ Synchronica makes push email software for a very wide variety of mobile phones. The software is sold to service providers and includes closely related data like calendar and address items. The company's 2008 revenue was 60% up on 2007, to about $6.1M. Synchronica is focusing on working with major VARs/integrators who ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/18/synchronica-mobile-messaging-update/ Which hosted Exchange vendors will survive? After all, Microsoft is now offering its own version of hosted Exchange. And Microsoft's offering is good, and very attractive. Some will survive by competing on price. Most others will survive by competing on functionality; e.g., better service, or better integration with third-party tools such ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/17/which-hosted-exchange-vendors-will-survive/ Intermedia is a successful hosted Exchange vendor. We were recently updated by the firm, and the following may be of interest:      Company believes it now has the greatest number of customers for full hosted Exchange--we see no reason to disbelieve this claim. These are seats for full MAPI running with ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/16/intermedias-hosted-exchange/ HP's archiving has gone quiet for the last two years. During this time, the company has been mulling over its plans, and refining its marketing messages and internal sales and support procedures. Here's a quick summary of the situation:      Originally known as RISS, more recently as Integrated Archiving Platform (IAP).      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/15/hps-iap-archiving-an-update/ Jetico makes data encryption and file wiping technology. The latter caught our eye. As readers may be aware, deleting a file is unlikely to really delete the information. Chunks of the information remain. It’s hard to get rid of information, and that's a security problem. A growing number of vendors offer solutions ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/09/jeticos-military-standard-file-wipes/ Archiving is becoming more and more attractive for many SharePoint users. SharePoint is a natural application to manage file sharing, collaboration, and content sharing. With the introduction of MOSS 2007, its popularity has grown rapidly. However, SharePoint’s success brings challenges in storage growth, item-level restore, retention, and compliance. Just like Exchange ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/08/the-benefits-of-sharepoint-archiving/ We had an update recently from Axceler, which makes ControlPoint, a useful administration tool for SharePoint:      Helps with a wide variety of SharePoint issues, such as:          Managing permissions          Monitoring and managing activity and storage and generally seeing what's happening          Moving and copying sites      Uses ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/05/axcelers-useful-sharepoint-administrator-product/ StoredIQ has an appliance that scans and categorizes a variety of types of ESI. Its main use is as an e-discovery tool:      Scans and indexes:          Files, Exchange, Notes/Domino, SharePoint material          ECM repositories: Documentum          Email archives: Symantec Vault, EMC Email Xtender      Kazeon is main competition.      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/04/storediq-e-discovery-appliance/ Quest is working on a new product for e-discovery, Quest e-Discovery Manager. In summary:      Supports MS Exchange email. SharePoint and file servers planned for later versions.      Works on live Exchange 2003/7/10 and EDB files.      Works on Quest Archive Manager; support for other archives planned for later versions.      Workflows and access ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/04/quests-e-discovery-manager/ Webcast to be held on Wednesday, July 29, 2009, at 8:30 a.m. Pacific, 11:30 a.m. Eastern, 4:30 p.m. U.K., and 5:30 p.m. Central European. One hour. To register for this webcast, click here. There is no charge to attend. In September 2004, Veritas Software purchased KVS for its email archiving product, Enterprise ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/06/01/veritas-acquires-kvs-in-retrospect-2/ Singapore-based BoxSentry has been busy. While beefing up its technology base -- in part to compensate for the loss of the challenge/response layer -- the company has developed new techniques to better identify false positives. BoxSentry has wrapped the new techniques in a product it's calling LogiQ. The idea is that ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/26/boxsentry-fights-false-positives/ Cabinet NG makes document management and workflow software. We like what we know of this mean-and-lean firm:      Like a much easier-to-use version of the big document management products (Documentum, FileNet, etc.).      Attractive solution for SMEs.      On-premises and cloud-based versions.      Offers industry-specific configurations for finance, medical, insurance, distribution, and manufacturing verticals.      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/26/cabinet-ng-document-management/ "Let's meet some time next week -- what times work on your end?" -- overloaded knowledge worker If this sounds familiar, you’re like many office workers who routinely jump through hoops to set up meetings with individuals outside your company. Emails sent back and forth with dates and times manually entered. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/21/scheduling-meetings-got-you-down-wanna-tungle/ The censors at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have gone overboard. According to this report concerning the interrogation five years ago in a Sudanese jail of Abousfian Abdelrazik – accused of having links to al-Qaeda – "every word on that attached eight-page memo has been blacked out, including page ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/21/overly-redactive-intelligence-services/ TechEd North America 2009 was held May 11-15, 2009, in Los Angeles. We attended:      Greatly reduced numbers; perhaps 5,000 people instead of an expected 15,000. No doubt mainly due to widespread corporate cost-cutting. Lotusphere suffered similarly.      Many very valuable educational sessions, giving practical as well as planning advice.      The exhibition ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/20/teched-from-the-messaging-perspective-and-a-divine-message/ AVG makes one of the last free AV products. At the RSA Conference, we talked about why the company is sticking with its "freemium" model ... According to AVG, it's positively beneficial to have the majority of its "customers" who don't pay for the product. It makes lead generation really easy. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/18/avg-loves-its-freeloaders/ Astaro sells a line of low-cost unified threat protection appliances. In the past, the company gained a reputation for developing its products "for engineers, by engineers." However, that way of planning the product roadmap has changed. Astaro claims "600 new features" in three major releases over the past year -- versions 7.2, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/18/astaro-drops-its-rd-led-roadmap/ Many organizations are still running Exchange 2003 and it is working well. Exchange 2007 is the current active release, and Exchange 2010 will be released at the end of 2009. Should E2003 users upgrade to E2007, or simply wait and upgrade directly to E2010, skipping E2007 altogether? The key issues are:      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/14/whether-to-upgrade-to-exchange-2010/ What a nice man Florin Talpes is. We met the CEO of BitDefender at the RSA Conference and found him a pleasant, thoughtful personality. He's not going to allow BitDefender to make the same mistake as certain other Eastern-European AV companies, which got too big too quickly and rested on their ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/14/bitdefender-defends-its-position-in-the-av-market/ At the RSA Conference, we sat down with Commtouch, a company best known for its OEM anti-spam engine that is licensed by a long list of well-known email security vendors. In January, the company launched a Web security service, using a similar architecture and business model as its anti-spam technology. In ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/13/commtouchs-new-oem-web-security-business/ Varonis produces a management tool to help IT do "unstructured data governance." In other words, it helps people manage the random dumping grounds of opaque files sitting around on shared drives. Compliance and e-discovery are the watchwords here. Varonis is very proud of its EMC partnership. EMC resells the product to ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/11/varonis-the-jelly-to-the-peanut-butter-of-lan-file-shares/ We sat down with Websense at the RSA Conference. The big announcement is that the company has finally come out with a prebuilt appliance. It's easy to be cynical. It wouldn't be hard to see this as Websense being "late to the party." Naturally, the company doesn't view it that way. Websense ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/11/websense-finally-gets-appliance-religion/ At the RSA Conference, we were almost blinded by the huge grins on the faces of the Abaca reps. As you may recall, Abaca has a really interesting spin on the spam filtering problem. Finely tuned mathematics and a big database of receiver statistics give back up some truly impressive claims. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/07/abacas-radical-anti-spam-tech-wins-at-yahoo/ Singapore-based BoxSentry has historically been known as a challenge/response spam filter vendor. Readers will probably be aware that we're no fans of C/R. Briefly, if a C/R recipient is sent email "from" a sender that it's never heard of, it auto-replies with a challenge. Until the sender has satisfactorily responded to ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/05/07/boxsentry-ditches-challengeresponse/ We recently described an interesting and important aspect of Notes/Domino 8, Composite Applications. We have several concerns about such applications. Building the Notes PIM application as a composite application means that in theory:      Individual PIM component applications can be reused as elements of new composite applications.      The view or data parts ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/22/about-lotus-composite-applications-2/ Government agencies at all levels are responsible for disseminating public information. This includes both paper and electronic information. Electronic information includes email, files, documents, spreadsheets, and all other forms of electronic information. President Obama recently issued this memorandum that endorses U.S. FOIA and reaffirms the commitment to accountability and transparency ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/21/obama-reaffirms-freedom-of-information-act/ At last year's Lotusphere, Lotus released Notes and Domino version 8. Notes version 8 marked a significant milestone in Notes client development. Notes 8 morphed from being a native Windows (and OS/X) client, to an Eclipse-based client, capable of being deployed simultaneously atop Windows, Linux, and OS/X. Eclipse is an ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/20/about-lotus-composite-applications/ Enrique Salem is the new CEO at Symantec. He is quickly charting a new course for the software giant. At the recent Storage Networking World (SNW), Salem touched on many topics with the audience, and his comments about the convergence of backup and archiving were of interest. "Why touch data ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/20/new-symantec-ceo-presents-archiving-vision/ We recently summarized IBM's LotusLive brand. One question that arises is how the use of a separate hosted platform will affect customers. Microsoft has built its online offerings atop its cloud platform (Windows Azure) and is exploiting Active Directory federation. However, IBM's initial LotusLive offerings are not based on IBM's Blue ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/16/lotuslive-has-different-on-prem-vs-extranet-platforms/ IBM launched LotusLive at this year's Lotusphere, with some associated confusion. It wasn't clear:      Whether LotusLive was merely a rebranding of Bluehouse      What the role of Notes/Domino would be, given the simultaneous announcement that IBM was acquiring Outblaze Ferris recently had an additional briefing on LotusLive that has cleared up some ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/16/about-lotuslive/ On April 15, 2009, Microsoft released a public beta of the next version of Exchange, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. This has hitherto been known as Exchange 14, and been tested by some five million users via Microsoft's Outlook Live for Live@Edu program. General availability will be in 2H09. For this author, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/15/exchange-2010-summary-key-features/ Maintaining the integrity of, and timely access to, a user's message store has been a major dilemma for Exchange over the years. Exchange lagged badly behind Lotus Notes/Domino because:      Lotus Notes employed a single OS file to hold a single user's mail file, while Exchange used a single "storage group" ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/15/exchange-2010-exciting-message-store-performance-and-redundancy-improvements/ Exchange 2010, announced on April 15, 2009, has built-in email archiving. In summary:      Tightly integrated with Outlook.      PSTs can be dragged and dropped into the archive.      Unified search across the live message store and the archive.      Search across multiple mailboxes for qualified staff.      Simple retention policies, based on the number ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/15/exchange-2010-archiving-summary-assessment/ When we think about archiving, email comes to mind first. For the majority of organizations, email archiving has become a standard application for managing email storage growth and for email discovery. Archiving is now spreading to other forms of electronic communication, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, and files. What about information in ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/13/archiving-and-e-discovery-to-support-social-networking/ Some people feel e-discovery covers the needs of archiving. For example, in this article, the author takes the position that archiving is expensive and for the most part unnecessary, while a full-service e-discovery solution is the better choice. The cost of archiving is not the point. The key value of archiving ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/13/archiving-vs-e-discovery/ The e-discovery challenge is worldwide, although granted it's at its most draining in the U.S. For example, see this recent posting about new e-discovery laws in Australia. It discusses new federal rules in Australia that require all email and electronic information be produced and exchanged, preferably in their original formats. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/10/australian-e-discovery/ Iron Mountain announced a new hosted archiving service for files. Virtual File Store includes an on-premise appliance combined with hosted storage:      Information is moved to the appliance either via automation or manually.      Files are then automatically moved to secure cloud storage hosted by Iron Mountain.      It can be configured for ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/09/iron-mountains-new-file-archiving-service/ This recent article discusses cloud backup and the challenge to scale. The author makes many good points about data integrity and scalability, and the same principles apply to archiving. Cloud archival of critical enterprise information seems easy and makes sense. On the practical side, there are risks of data loss, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/06/cloud-archiving-is-useful/ Email archiving has an important new product. This week, EMC announced the availability of SourceOne, the replacement for EmailXtender. EMC's EmailXtender is one of the original email archiving solutions. It has been bought and sold three times, and for the past several years has been sold by EMC. For years, rumors ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/06/email-archiving-competition-intensifies/ Archiving technology is evolving, and this means that sometimes customers move between solutions. The migrations aren't straightforward. A major area of difficulty is email "stubbing"--where the archive solution removes much of the email in an Exchange Store and leaves behind a short pointer to the removed information. Before archived data can ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/04/03/email-archive-migration-plan-for-stubbing/ Our recent piece about Lotus Foundations got me to thinking, primarily, about an underlying issue it addresses -- how to economically provide IT systems to small and medium businesses (SMBs) or to remote branch offices in larger organizations? The barrier to economic provision is not hardware or even software costs; rather, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/03/06/lotus-foundations-and-cracking-the-maintenanceadministrationsupport-nut/ We were recently updated on Lotus Foundations. In a nutshell:      Designed to host prepackaged Linux (and later this year, prepackaged Windows) applications.      Aimed, initially, at Lotus collaboration offerings (Domino, Sametime, etc.) and vertical market applications.      Designed to be drop shipped to a remote location (SMB or branch office).          ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/03/04/lotus-foundations-excellent-for-small-offices/ Microsoft made several important announcements on March 3rd concerning its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS):      BPOS will move from U.S.-only to worldwide availability starting in April, with worldwide trials available immediately.          This is good news for customers wishing to try BPOS located in countries of availability, namely (in ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/03/04/announcements-microsoft-exchangesharepointocs-online/ Perhaps the slowing economy is encouraging small technology acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting article on Oracle and the small acquisitions it has made in the past year. Oracle is well known for its large acquisitions (e.g., PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, and BEA), but it has also been busy ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/03/01/more-small-technology-acquisitions-as-economy-stumbles/ Once again the importance of archiving email is revealed in the recent scandal involving tainted peanut butter and the executive who issued orders to ship peanut products that tested positive for salmonella. See, for example, this Wall Street Journal article. Internal company emails were examined by the House Energy and ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/27/archived-emails-cast-harsh-light-on-peanut-executive/ We've just heard about Mailprotector, an in-the-cloud email threat control service. Main features are:      Spam control      Virus, phishing, malware control      Policy and compliance enforcement      Data loss prevention      Encryption--inbound and outbound via TLS      Availability and continuity      Hosted messaging and collaboration Pricing varies from around $4/user/month down to $0.65/user/month, depending on volumes. Mailprotector does ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/25/mailprotector-malware-saas/ With cloud computing evolving rapidly, a number of vendors have taken the systems management model into the cloud. One of these is San Francisco-based Tap In Systems. It is one of the first vendors we’re aware of making use of the virtual servers (called "instances" in Amazon Web Services speak) ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/25/systems-management-moving-to-the-cloud/ The February 3 announcement of the availability of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) makes it timely to review the state of Microsoft real-time collaboration. To recap, OCS provides instant messaging, presence, interactive voice (1-1 and conferencing), Web conferencing, and desktop sharing. It delivers this through its Office Communicator ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/23/the-state-of-microsoft-based-real-time-collaboration/ The Florida legislature routinely deletes all email after only one month, according to a recent article. As the article discusses, traditional arguments for such short retention are now very doubtful:      Storage is very cheap.      Email archiving solutions are readily available at a reasonable cost. The article suggests, reasonably enough, that the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/23/florida-lawmakers-have-just-one-month-esi-retention/ At its launch of OCS R2 on February 3, Microsoft spent much time describing the benefits of Office Communications Server. OCS provides instant messaging, presence, interactive voice (1-1 and conferencing), Web conferencing, and desktop sharing. One is accustomed to sales exaggeration at such times. But in this case, the benefits presented ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/19/the-benefits-of-real-time-collaboration/ Updated Feb 20 4.25pm PST to correct and clarify user storage quotas. Updated Feb 21 2.30am PST to clarify that Microsoft claims that these quotas have changed. Updated Feb 21 6.45am PST to add "mixed messages" comment. Updated Feb 24 11.15am PST to add link to service description Updated Feb 24 12.05pm PST to ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/18/exchange-losing-ground-to-gmail-in-smb/ We're writing an analysis of CA's recent acquisition of Orchestria. We'd like to hear from anyone that can help us with the following: Orchestria's revenue and profit/loss history Terms of the deal The main business problems Orchestria faced over the last two years How Orchestria sought a buyer, and how the negotiations with CA ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/18/cas-acquisition-of-orchestria-were-seeking-input/ Organizations subject to Freedom of Information are on notice that if they lie, they're more likely to be caught. The San Francisco Chronicle on February 9th contained a headline story about the University of California's hiring practices. It appears it lied about the nature of a substantial bonus given to one ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/17/freedom-of-information-creates-exposure-at-university-of-california/ For many organizations, the ability to define and enforce retention schedules is important for email archiving. So when evaluating email archiving products, be able to take a position on what your retention needs are. Think through such issues as:      What kind of emails need to be stored, and for how ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/16/dont-let-email-retention-rules-bog-down-decision-to-archive-email/ Beejive has produced a very nice mobile instant messaging client for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. It supports a number of IM protocols. I tried out Beejive on the iPhone, using XMPP (the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The protocol support is good, and the user experience and interface ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/16/beejive-mobile-instant-messaging-client/ Our sources tell us that the next version of Microsoft Exchange, "Exchange 14," will have major improvements to its storage management. One of Exchange's biggest problems is that the mailboxes are often now large--1 or 2 GB or more. This translates to poor performance and backups that take too long. Two key ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/13/exchange-14-addresses-storage-management/ Content Circles is a sort of easy-to-use-and-install ECM system:      Allows users to work on shared files.      System tracks the status of each version of a file; e.g. who opened it, who has control, etc.      PC and Mac rich clients.      Users maintain files locally.      Simple to use and maintain.      Directory service ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/11/content-circles-ecm-lite/ On February 3, Microsoft announced the general availability of Office Communications Server R2. OCS provides instant messaging, presence, interactive voice (1-1 and conferencing), Web conferencing, and desktop sharing. In summary:      Various new features were announced, many of interest but none earth-shattering. The key thing is that Microsoft is continuing to develop ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/11/microsoft-ocs-r2-announcement-key-points/ All email archive solutions have an embedded index engine, and these have an important effect on the functionality of an archiving product. Some of the most popular indexing engines are Alta Vista, dtSearch, FAST, and IDOL. They index all the archive files (message body, subject line, attachments) and provide for fast ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/09/evaluating-the-search-engine-in-email-archiving/ A number of firms are offering hosted versions of Microsoft's Exchange, SharePoint, and OCS, using Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration, or HMC for short. On November 17, 2008, Microsoft announced its own version of these hosted services; i.e., where Microsoft provides the hosting platform itself. Service providers using HMC are ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/02/microsoft-exchange-online-implications-for-firms-offering-hosted-exchange/ Microsoft charges around $15/user/month for:      Exchange Online (email/calendaring/address books)      Office Communications Online (presence/instant messaging)      Office Live Meeting (Web conferencing)      SharePoint Online (shared spaces/workflow management)      Exchange Hosted Services (email archiving, spam and malware filtering) Microsoft will have difficulty maintaining its online pricing at this level:      The underlying costs of providing equivalent functionality ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/02/01/microsoft-online-collaboration-prices-to-decrease/ Microsoft Online Services are reasonably priced compared to the cost of running equivalent on-premises software. Consider what's likely to be a common purchase of Microsoft Online Services:      Exchange Online (email/calendaring/address books)      Office Communications Online (presence/instant messaging)      Office Live Meeting (Web conferencing)      SharePoint Online (shared spaces/workflow management)      Exchange Hosted Services (email archiving/spam ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/29/microsoft-online-collaboration-services-are-reasonably-priced/ Every year or two, Ferris Research updates its estimates for the total cost of spam. Here are our 2009 estimates: Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That's a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/28/cost-of-spam-is-flattening-our-2009-predictions/ Here are our observations about attendence for Lotusphere 2009:      Around 2,500 paying, full conference registrants. Of these, perhaps 60% were IT staff, the rest were ISVs, consultants, VARs, and sponsors.      Around 3,500 people at the event in all.      150 exhibitors.      Exhibition traffic was lighter than most years, perhaps 20% down ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/27/lotusphere-2009-attendance/ For the last five years or so, Microsoft periodically tells everyone that Notes is dead, or dying. See this current example at Microsoft's press Web site. Ferris Research is quoted as saying that Exchange has a 65% share of the messaging market, while Notes/Domino has a 10% share. While it's true, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/27/notesdomino-is-alive-and-well/ At Lotusphere, Lotus announced LotusLive, a new collaborative SaaS:      A cloud-based portfolio of social networking and collaboration services.      Its capabilities will include Web conferencing and event management, online meetings, file sharing, survey forms, dynamic charting, profiles/contacts, chat, and Web-based email and calendaring.     IBM's Bluehouse project is being folded into LotusLive.     Initial availability ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/26/lotuslive-new-collaborative-saas/ Blue Man Group was a lot of fun in the opening general session, pumping out jaunty music and staring at us all as if we were weirdos. Dan Ackroyd was the other big name. He was funny, plus he told a rather long tale about the wisdom of treating underlings ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/26/lotusphere-general-session-summary/ Cloud services--including Exchange Online and Hosted Notes email--would seem well positioned in light of the current economy. Customers are looking for areas to cut operating expenses; and what enterprise service is better suited for commoditization than email? Hosting providers that demonstrate high availability and reliability stand ready to reap the ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/25/cloud-services-after-the-economic-storm-passes/ Both Microsoft and Lotus are developing cloud-based collaboration services. Microsoft's offerings are being described fairly clearly, while Lotus' mode of presentation is confusing, to the detriment of Lotus and customers alike. Microsoft Services In late 2008, Microsoft announced the availability of a number of cloud-based collaboration services. These were based on cloud-hosted ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/25/microsofts-vs-lotus-cloud-based-collaboration/ In some way one of the most important announcements from Lotusphere 2009 was not aired until Wednesday in a press release, nor covered in analyst pre-briefings, the general session, or a breakout. Ferris learned of it from a posting on Volker Weber's excellent Web site ("Ceci n'est pas un blog"). ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/23/lotus-intends-to-support-microsoft-activesync/ I recently received an email from an independent reader who accused me of manifesting a pro-Microsoft, and an anti-IBM, bias. It set me to thinking. I've never worked for Microsoft. I spent part of my career working for one of its major competitors (Lotus). I had the honor of being ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/22/wot-me-nick-shelness-biased/ We've been looking at the Lotus Protector Security Platform. This is an email malware solution of much interest to Notes/Domino users:      Lotus Protector for Mail Security provides spam and virus control, and protection from other malware attacks such as phishing, denial-of-service, and directory harvesting attacks.      Filters email streams.      Launched September ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/21/lotus-tight-spam-and-virus-control-for-notesdomino/ At Lotusphere 2009, Lotus spent quite a lot of the Day 1 Keynote talking about Symphony, its free, open source, "Eclipse," and OpenOffice.org-based, alternative to Microsoft Office. The current release of Symphony (1.2) is based on a back-level OpenOffice.org code base. At Lotusphere, Lotus announced plans for three new releases ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/20/lotus-symphony-hard-to-see-why-it-will-succeed/ There were many attractive aspects of Lotusphere 2009. However, one disappointment is that Lotus doesn't seem to have a clear vision of where it's going. The general session consisted of a series of presentations falling into three categories:      Enhancements to existing products      Reminders about existing products      Announcements of new products, ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/20/lack-of-vision-at-lotusphere/ Archiving vendor Mimosa Systems recently announced its Retention and Classification Option. This is a good illustration of capabilities that archiving solutions are typically adding:      Uses conventional policy definition filters--Boolean logic, regular expression pattern matching, etc.--to scan new emails, or an established archive.      A match causes a classification to be assigned ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/20/mimosas-email-retention-technology/ Here's my take on Lotusphere 2009 based on the posted slide decks and Lotus's analyst briefings of the last few days. Lotusphere runs from January 18 to 22 in Orlando, FL, and is the big annual Lotus user conference. The General Session presents a mass of detail but is ultimately light ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/18/lotusphere-2009-first-take/ During VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 recently, Microsoft and IBM announced that interdomain federation based on SIP/SIMPLE will be available in IBM's Sametime Gateway later in Q408 (version 8.0.2). This will enable users of Sametime to communicate with OCS 2007 (and OCS 2007 R2 users once that ships in early 2009). We ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/14/interdomain-federation-between-ibm-sametime-and-microsoft-ocs/ Most organizations have policies on how long to keep such things as key taxation and employee documents. If they are in hardcopy form, the documents are kept for an appropriate time, and then disposed of. In other words, retention policies are applied. The situation is much less clear with electronic documents. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/13/the-state-of-email-retention-schedules/ MX Logic is a well-established email- and Web-filtering SaaS. Here's an update on the company. Main Service Elements:      Email virus control.      Email spam control.      Email archiving.      Email disaster recovery/continuity; webmail access if Exchange/Notes goes down.      Web malware and content filtering. Indicative End Customer Pricing:      Spam and virus filtering is $1.35 to $2.75/user/month.      ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/12/filtering-saas-mx-logic-update/ If you're interested in the classification of electronic information, IBM's Classification Module is worth knowing about. Assigning a category to electronic material is useful, mainly for archiving/ECM/regulations compliance/e-discovery/retention purposes. Today, governments and military organizations are the main users, but classification is likely to become mainstream over the next year or two. The ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/11/ibms-automatic-classification-module/ IBM recently presented its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS), in conjunction with Virtual Bridges, to Ferris. IBM proposes that OCCS presents substantial cost savings over the equivalent Microsoft approach. We're skeptics. Background:      IBM's OCCS is not a new product offering.      Rather, it is a bundling of existing Lotus products for Linux ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/09/ibms-open-collaboration-client-solution-saves-money/ 17a-4 is a consulting and tools firm that specializes in archiving and compliance. As its name suggests, the company focuses on helping broker-dealers ensure they store information as required by the SEC. Two-thirds of customers are financial services (especially broker-dealers), and one-third are law firms or in-house legal teams concerned ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/07/17a-4s-useful-archiving-and-compliance-tools/ A nice feature of Outlook is the ability to view Web pages without leaving Outlook. The feature is called "folder home page" and it has been supported in Outlook since Outlook 2000. Folder home page is especially useful for email archiving. By simply clicking an "archive folder" in Outlook, users can ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/06/using-outlook-web-features-for-archiving/ On Dec 3, 2007, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) group announced its XML standard for e-discovery of electronically stored information. This facilitates the transfer of electronic information (e.g., emails, files, databases) between e-discovery stages, software, and organizations. Without the XML standard, emails, files, and other electronic information are transferred ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/05/xml-standard-for-e-discovery/ Are you a Novell GroupWise, ZENworks, or Teaming customer? Are you disappointed that Novell canceled the BrainShare event? Do you know about GWAVACon? Since 2005, this conference has been focused on the Novell collaboration community. GWAVACon has been held in Dallas, Sydney, San Diego, Munich, and Berlin. This year the U.S. ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/04/gwavacon-brainshare-alternative-for-novell-collaboration-community/ Here are our predictions for 2009, focusing on the worlds of messaging and collaboration, content control, archiving, compliance, e-discovery, and data leak prevention. Top Three Predictions: Consensus View. There's a consensus among us that:      Spam's being beaten.      Messaging SaaS will take off.      Virtual meetings will continue to grow in popularity. Top Three ... http://www.ferris.com/2009/01/01/ferris-2009-predictions-immortalility-mobility-and-staying-put/ The November 17 announcement of Microsoft Exchange Online included a case study in which a company migrated away from Notes using Microsoft Exchange Online. This is mainly marketing gloss. Microsoft has been announcing the death of Notes for five years. Ferris survey data indicates that in the enterprise, Microsoft and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/22/microsoft-exchange-online-wont-particularly-facilitate-notes-to-exchange-migration/ As we noted in our posting Cloud Computing - A Taxonomy, cloud computing can be delivered in three guises:      As Public Services (PSs) hosted in large, multisite data centers, and delivered over the public Internet.      As Virtual Private Services (VPSs) hosted in large, multisite, multitenanted data centers, and delivered securely ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/19/microsofts-approach-to-the-cloud/ Cloud computing is becoming important for very massive messaging systems, such as Gmail and Microsoft Exchange Online. And there is no doubt that "cloud computing" is the IT industry's latest "buzz" phrase, but what does it mean? At its simplest, it describes computing cycles delivered over the net. But how is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/18/cloud-computing-a-taxonomy/ In an earlier posting, I wrote about Microsoft Identity Roadmap. I now want to look at Microsoft's cloud-based identity offerings in greater detail. These include:      Microsoft Live Identity Services      The Live Identity Framework (an SDK)      The Microsoft Federation Gateway (a Live service)      The .NET Access Control Service Microsoft Live Identity Services is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/17/microsofts-identity-roadmap-in-the-cloud/ In an earlier posting, I wrote about the Microsoft Identity Roadmap. I now want to look at Microsoft's on-premise identity offerings in greater detail. These include:      The "Geneva" Server (the project name "Geneva" will almost certainly change)      The "Geneva" Framework      The Microsoft Services Connector      Microsoft CardSpace "Geneva" The "Geneva" Server is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/16/microsofts-identity-roadmap-on-premise/ In an earlier posting (Microsoft on Identity), I wrote about Kim Cameron's work on identity. Cameron's work has given rise to a truly open Microsoft Identity Architecture and a set of emerging Microsoft Identity products and toolkits that span the gamut from a browser, through the Windows desktop, to on-premise Windows ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/15/microsofts-identity-roadmap/ Over the last couple of years, when acquaintances have moaned that Microsoft is primarily a copycat and not an innovator, I have pointed to the work of Kim Cameron as a primary counterexample. There are others. The products of Cameron's innovation have been threefold.      Two seminal papers:          The "The ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/14/microsoft-innovates-in-the-identity-arena/ Microsoft recently announced Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at VoiceCon in Amsterdam. Features include:      Integration of persistent group chat (came out of Parlano acquisition).      Attendant console and delegation – allows for an administrative assistant to triage calls.      Audioconferencing bridge – allows for IT departments to manage their own on-prem dial-in ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/11/ocs-2007-r2-to-launch-in-february-2009/ Cisco announced on November 3 that it completed the acquisition of Jabber, an instant messaging and presence provider based in Denver. Jabber is not Cisco's first acquisition in the messaging/collaboration space. Recall that Cisco purchased the conferencing platform WebEx 18 months ago, and in September it purchased PostPath, the Linux-based ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/10/cisco-acquires-jabber/ Last month, Microsoft shuffled around leadership in the Exchange and Windows Mobile teams. Part of this was undoubtedly just to keep things varied for the execs and product groups, but is there another reason? We think Corporate Vice President Terry Myerson's move to Windows Mobile is intended to bring his wealth ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/09/analysis-of-microsoft-corporate-vp-shuffle-%e2%80%93-exchange-and-windows-mobile/ I recommend a useful paper from The Sedona Conference, Commentary on Preservation, Management and Identification of Sources of Information that are Not Reasonably Accessible. This is about the handling of electronic information that's too hard or expensive to retrieve during e-discovery. It's a complex topic, but the paper is easy to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/08/useful-paper-on-e-discovery-of-inaccessible-information/ Microsoft announced at the Microsoft Hardware Engineering Conference (HEC 2008) that the next release of Windows Server -- Windows Server 2008 R2, due for release in 2010 -- will only be available in 64-bit versions (Intel X64, AMD 64-bit, and Intel Itanium processors). Windows Server 2008 R2 should not be viewed ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/07/microsofts-windows-server-2008-microsofts-last-32-bit-server-os/ Microsoft has recently changed the basis of its server pricing from being CPU-based to being processor socket-based. This is good for Microsoft as well as Microsoft's customers. Why has Microsoft made this change, and what does it mean? Until quite recently, "Moore's law," which is a statement about the rate at which ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/04/a-subtle-change-to-microsoft-server-pricing/ Lotus announced Lotus Notes Traveler support for the Nokia S60 3rd Edition platform, and the 80 million Nokia smartphones that employ this platform. Lotus Notes Traveler for the Nokia S60 3rd Edition platform consists of two components: A Lotus Notes Traveler Service (LNTS) A Lotus Notes Traveler Client (LNTC) The LNTS is a Domino ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/03/lotus-domino-support-for-nokia-smartphones/ MX Logic is a well-established email- and Web-filtering SaaS provider. The company has just launched a new email archiving service, replacing its existing offering. In summary:      End-user and administrative access via Web browser or Outlook plugin.      Import using EML and PST files; export via EML files.      Works with Exchange 2000, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/12/01/mx-logic-new-archiving-saas/ On November 17, 2008, Microsoft launched cloud-based (Software as a Service) versions of Exchange and SharePoint -- Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online. In summary:      Microsoft is hosting these Online services directly in its own data centers.      These Online services are part of a growing family of Online services ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/30/summary-of-microsoft-exchange-and-sharepoint-online/ Struggling economies bring challenges, but also opportunities. The IT world is ripe for a major shift, for three reasons:      Economic concerns are driving IT departments to aggressively increase efficiency and reduce cost.      Vendors have built vast SaaS infrastructures to enable outsourced messaging, collaboration, applications, and compliance solutions at a fixed ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/25/winds-of-change-will-catalyze-big-shift-to-saas-and-virtualization/ In an email from FaceTime President and CEO Kailash Ambwani earlier this month, the company announced a mass layoff in an effort to reduce operating expenses by 30%. In the letter, Ambwani indicated that the company’s revenues depend primarily on the financial sector, and suggested that year-over-year revenue growth into ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/24/expect-plenty-of-layoffs/ Microsoft posted a job description on November 4 that sheds more light on its ExchangeLabs infrastructure than has previously been publicly released. ExchangeLabs is Microsoft's way of testing "the next version of Exchange in high-scale services environments." To date, customers on the infrastructure are restricted to academic institutions with .edu domains. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/23/exchangelabs-surpasses-15m-mailboxes-on-exchange-14/ Email archiving vendor Mimosa has published a useful book on email archiving, Email Archiving for Dummies:      Covers the basics of email archiving, including basic operation, hosted vs. in-house, and storage management.      Provides an in-depth review of the legal discovery challenges that are driving the need for email archiving.     Easy to read, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/20/useful-book-on-email-archiving/ Email archiving solutions are valuable for organizations that are subject to stringent regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. For many organizations, the main purpose of an email archiving solution is to centrally manage email records for e-discovery. Thus when you evaluate an email archiving ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/17/remove-the-it-department-from-electronic-discovery-process/ On Oct 21, IBM announced Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, the first in a wave of announcements around a strategic cloud services offering. No newcomer to the hosting arena, IBM has been providing custom outsourcing to customers for many years, and this includes hosted Notes, Domino, BlackBerry, and other business productivity ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/16/ibms-hosted-domino-offering/ earlyCASE recently launched its SaaS on-demand e-discovery solution for early case assessment. earlyCASE lets organizations rapidly examine a subset of evidence to determine volumes and types of data, relative quantities of duplicates, numbers of different file types, and other analysis that can be extrapolated across the entire collection of data. In ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/13/earlycase-releases-saas-based-early-case-assessment/ LiveOffice announced its Troubled Archive Relief Program (TARP) on November 4, which provides a "bailout" option for customers dissatisfied with their on-premises archiving solutions. We frequently hear of customers using on-premises archiving solutions who have had issues in their deployments, been frustrated by high-impact or frequent index corruption issues, or are ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/12/liveoffice-wants-frustrated-on-prem-archiving-customers/ Recently, we published a bulletin about Thru, a file transfer/synchronization product. As well as the paid products mentioned in the bulletin, there's a whole range of free software and services that perform some or all of these roles. One of our current favorites is FolderShare -- originally created by a company ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/09/alternative-file-transfersynchronization-tools/ There's an interesting report that AccessData is attempting to gain control over Guidance Software through an offer of $4.50 per share in cash and stock, following a rejection by Guidance recently. Given AccessData’s portfolio, such a hostile takeover is clearly an attempted consolidation play, and would be the boldest move ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/06/hostile-takeover-of-guidance-software/ Time for some light relief. This BBC News report graphically illustrates the "hilarious consequences" that can arise from misuse of an Out-of-Office auto-reply feature. (As they say in that part of the world, sy a 'n ddigrif chwedl.) But seriously, there is a point to this bulletin. Beware of automatically replying ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/05/out-of-office-auto-replies-considered-harmful/ Last month, David wrote a bulletin about Sendio. This bulletin is a follow-up to that. As the first bulletin mentioned, Sendio has a heritage of challenge/response (C/R) technology. As regular readers will know, we're no fans of C/R -- to put it mildly. In brief, our advice is to avoid any ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/04/sendio-followup-challengeresponse-is-still-a-bad-idea/ Many people need to transfer large files, on the order of 100MB and up. For example: Hospitals sending patient records. Architects exchanging building plans. Engineers collaborating on product designs. However, it's tough to transfer large files electronically. Email often can't handle anything more than 10MB or 20MB, and FTP sessions get broken and don't ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/11/02/thru-large-secure-file-transfer/ SharePoint sites and farms become challenging to administer as they grow. Axceler's ControlPoint helps. It was launched in January 2008, and the main features are:      User and permission management.      Site management (setting quotas, ensuring consistent appearance, etc.).      Reporting across many sites on permissions and usage (including activity, storage, and content).      ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/30/axcelers-sharepoint-administration-tool/ IBM announced its Content Collection and Archiving products. In summary: The Problem      Today, there are typically a series of different archiving systems, corresponding to different types of electronic information and/or different organizational groups.      As a result, there is little consistency in the archives. This is costly. It also increases the chances ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/28/ibms-content-collection-and-archiving/ Autonomy closed its office in Ottawa, Canada, that used to house the original Educom Ltd. team. All Ottawa employees have been terminated except for three in sales, one in support, and one instructor. The original development team for Autonomy's EAS email archival solution is no longer employed. Recall that Zantaz purchased ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/27/autonomy-eas-email-archiving-suffering/ Here's an update on USA.NET, a hosted messaging firm. USA.NET was purchased by Perimeter eSecurity in 3Q2007. Perimeter has a wide range of network-related services, which are described as falling into the following categories: vulnerability defense, intrusion defense, network defense, email defense, system defense, and user defense. Most customers are medium-size ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/26/snapshot-usanets-hosted-email-services/ Return Path offers tools and consulting to help you get email delivered. This is a problem for many organizations, because some spam filters suppress as much as 20% of legitimate bulk email. Return Path is the leader in its field. Offering Summary For organizations that send out bulk emails:          Deliverability and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/23/snapshot-return-paths-email-deliverability-services/ Microsoft has had several attempts over the years to offer hosted messaging solutions. They have all started with great publicity, and major telcos have always announced support. And then, little by little, the offering has faded from view. So we're wondering, how is Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration doing? ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/22/how-is-microsoft-exchange-hosted-services-doing/ In a lawsuit, you have to respond to requests for information from the other party. It's easy to inadvertently provide sensitive material, typically privileged material, that you should not provide. The larger the case, the easier it is to make such slips. The problem is exacerbated by the variety of policies ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/21/avoid-giving-opposing-counsel-privileged-material/ On October 8, 2008, Google announced its new Message Discovery, an email archiving service. This is an exciting development and at first sight it appears to be a very good deal. You get 10 years of unlimited email archiving for only $45 per user per year. At the very least, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/20/googles-email-discovery/ When you apply legal holds, you typically preserve much too much stuff. That translates to much high costs later on while processing the material. It sounds valuable, and sensible. Recommind has just launched Insite Legal Hold. Working with results, you iteratively refine your search criteria until you have a relevant, and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/19/better-legal-holds-from-recommind/ Here's an update on content control software vendor Marshal. Products Summary      MailMarshal SMTP filters email for virus, spam, malware; applies policy-based acceptable use, data leak prevention, and encryption. Operates at Internet boundary.      MailMarshal Exchange does the same, but for internal MS Exchange traffic.      WebMarshal controls Web sessions: provides malware suppression, and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/16/snapshot-marshals-emailweb-content-control/ Symantec's Enterprise Vault is the leading email archiving product. The company recently announced V8.0, which is currently in beta. General availability is scheduled for early 2009. New features include:      Advanced Storage Reduction. With its optimized single instance storage, Enterprise Vault keeps just one copy of individual emails or files regardless of ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/15/enterprise-vault-80/ Sendio is a spam and email-based malware control vendor. Technology      Protects against email threats.      Specifically, spam, virus, phishing, miscellaneous malware.      Uses Kaspersky for anti-virus signatures and Commtouch for zero-hour virus protection.      Product first launched in January 2004.      Embodied in appliance. Pricing      Appliance comes in two flavors: 1) ESP 360, $1,995, for up ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/14/sendio-spam-control-vendor/ IronPort is now part of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit. It's still operating as a largely independent unit. IronPort's main business is still its C-Series anti-spam appliances, although its Web filtering business (i.e., the S-Series) is also important. General availability for the S-Series appliance was 1Q07. Technology Summary      Scans Web traffic (unlike ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/13/update-on-ciscoironport-s-series/ Proginet has a variety of file transfer offerings. In July 2008, it launched Slingshot, which is a large file attachment management system for Microsoft Exchange. The company has now announced Slingshot Vault, a ready-to-install, appliance-based version. Slingshot Vault Technology Summary Large file attachments, say beyond 5 or 10MB, create problems for email ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/12/proginet-large-file-xfer-for-ms-exchange/ C-MAIL is launching a tool to help prioritize email in one's inbox. Technology      Prioritizes email in Outlook's Inbox, Sent items, and some other subfolders.      Companies can predefine rules indicating priority; e.g., email from customers is high priority.      Dynamic additional prioritization based on the user's past email use, clicking habits, and how ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/09/c-mails-email-prioritization-tool/ Open-Xchange sells Exchange-like collaborative applications to service providers. It also offers Exchange-like services as a SaaS to small businesses. Technology Summary      Java code on server providing all Exchange-like collaboration features: calendar, contacts, tasks, folders.      Customer has choice of underlying email server technology.      Sold to service providers, who already have their own ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/08/snapshot-open-xchange-hosted-exchange-software-for-service-providers/ Many consumers and prosumers use POP email services provided by their ISPs or webmail services such as Hotmail and MSN. Finding out if new email has arrived requires them to check their mailboxes. Many users of these services would like proactive notification of email, the way you have on BlackBerry. Isode's ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/07/isode-improves-consumer-email-access-on-cell-phones/ Striata offers an e-billing and payment service. Technology Summary      You send Striata the same file you send to your print provider.      The Striata service handles document creation/manipulation, intelligent marketing insertion, and electronic delivery, which is by an emailed PDF document or HTML attachment.      PDFs and HTML attachments are encrpyted.      The PDFs ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/06/snapshot-striatas-e-billing-and-presentment/ Optenet is a substantial malware control vendor, with 200 staff and $20M+ revenues. It's little known in North America, and is now seeking to build its business in that geography. Main Capabilities      URL filtering, anti-virus, anti-phishing, anti-spyware, anti-spam.      IM blocking.      Spam control works on email, SMS, and MMS.      Optenet sells software ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/05/optenet-major-malware-control-vendor-targets-north-america/ Hosted Exchange archiving vendor LiveOffice has enhanced its user interface. Before, users had to go to a Web browser and interact with the archive in an Outlook look-alike environment. Now users access the archive in a special archive in Outlook's left-hand pane. For details, go here. This makes sense. The more support ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/02/liveoffice-email-archiving-adds-outlook-ui/ We're studying the costs of Microsoft-based Unified Communications (UC). If you're using Microsoft's UC functionality -- not just Exchange, but also IM and telephony -- we'd love to hear your responses to these few questions. You can see what other people are saying too -- see comments further down this page. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/10/01/costs-of-unified-communications-survey/ Adding disaster recovery/continuity to Exchange is usually a hassle, and expensive. Now Hosted Exchange 2007 and SaaS email archiving vendor LiveOffice is offering a free and easy-to-implement alternative called LiveOffice Mail Continuity. In summary:      You change your primary MX record to point to LiveOffice's IP address so that your mail ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/30/get-free-exchange-continuity-service-from-liveoffice/ Abaca has successfully sold a version of its Email Protection Gateway product to its first ISP customer. Terra Latin America, Brazil's largest ISP, is rolling out Abaca's product to protect its 12 million users from spam. Terra will deploy the product in its data centers in Brazil and Miami. Terra says it ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/29/abaca-announces-its-first-isp-spam-control-deal/ Mimecast offers a hosted email malware filtering, archiving, and continuity service. The company is established in the United Kingdom and selected other geographies. Since February 2008, it's been investing in building its North American business. Technology Summary      Works mainly with Microsoft Exchange.      Virus, spam, and malware control.      Policy-based archiving of all ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/28/snapshot-mimecasts-malware-filtering-archiving-continuity-saas/ Recently, the concept of a "prosumer"--a professional consumer--has emerged in the world of mobile phones. Prosumers fall into two categories:      A person who works in a larger enterprise, but doesn't have a BlackBerry or other high-end smartphone that's integrated with the internal IT system. The employee does, however, own his or ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/25/definition-of-a-prosumer/ Orange Legal, which offers a hosted e-discovery service, has recently come up with a useful tool that helps you estimate the cost of e-discovery. With the Predictive Pricing Estimator, you go online and plug in the volume of electronic information to be considered, in gigabytes. You also indicate the number of ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/24/useful-e-discovery-cost-estimator/ Cognition offers natural language processing software. This is useful in various ways, including: search through electronic archives, e-discovery, and compliance. Technology Summary      Natural language processing      Customer integrates with its own technology Main Customers      Cross industry applications      However, the company has particular success with legal, healthcare, publishing verticals      Eg, Lexis/Nexis offers Concordance, a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/23/cognition-natural-language-processing-for-archiving-e-discovery-compliance/ Synchronica announced it has acquired AxisMobile:      AxisMobile was purchased for £2.8 million ($5.1 million), paid mostly in shares of Synchronica.      AxisMobile was financially distressed.      Synchronica got a good deal. It paid a low price for good technology and removal of an important competitor. In addition, revenues from AxisMobile’s customers should ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/22/synchronica-acquires-axismobile/ Onset Technology has just launched a product--METAmessage ACT--that monitors and controls mobile devices. This is interesting--content control for mobile devices is only just beginning to happen. Technology Summary      Focus today is on BlackBerry; Windows Mobile version in development.      Scans for text strings, specific words, and pattern matches in messages.      Depending on ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/21/onsets-mobile-device-archiving-and-monitoring/ Gogimon is an interesting new type of search engine. Technology Summary: Main Features      Gogimon software resides on the end user's system.      It scans things like browsing history, favorite Web sites, and RSS feeds to determine user preferences.      Searches are aggregated and consolidated with Google, Yahoo, MSN Live searches.      Gogimon then applies ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/21/snapshot-gogimon-new-type-of-search/ Despite recent industry consolidation, many spam control vendors are still at large. It's hard to tell who's in the lead. You can see what products people are evaluating here--see comments further down this page. If you add your own data, we will send you a summary of the findings. Please either ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/19/spam-control-products-survey/ Synchronica announced it has just raised $10M in equity funding:      Total raised to date including the $10M is $18M.      The $10M will be used for product integration, and for growth in emerging markets, such as China, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.      Interestingly, Synchronica tied the funding ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/16/synchronica-raises-10m/ In previous bulletins, we recounted the sorry tale of the domain owner who made a common mistake when setting up his DNS entries. We also explained why it was a bad idea. So what should he have done? He had the right basic idea, but he got the CNAME in the wrong ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/16/how-best-to-use-a-cname/ In an unannounced move, Akonix is now wholly owned by Quest Software. Beginning some time in the last week, Akonix has begun to display its Web page logo with the phrase "is now a part of Quest Software." Akonix develops and markets an instant messaging security and compliance appliance. By acquiring ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/15/quest-quietly-purchases-akonix/ In August, Lumigent launched technology that scans databases in order to ensure policy and regulatory compliance. Technology Summary:      Monitors information in structured databases      Generates dynamic or report-based alerts if data values exceed range, or more generally if they are inconsistent with pre-defined policy      Automatic baselining feature sets initial values to current ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/11/lumigents-compliance-monitoring-for-structured-data/ Synchronica sells email and collaboration software for mobile phones. More specifically, it offers:     Mobile Gateway, which provides push email software for mobile phones. It also provides for desktop/mobile synchronization of calendar, address book, notes, and tasks.      Mobile Backup, which backs up desktop content to a remote server. Technology Summary: Main Features     Provides push ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/11/snapshot-synchronicas-mobile-email-software/ Pivotal Veracity offers email deliverability services. That is, if you send a lot of email, it helps you make sure as much of it gets through to recipients as is possible. Technology Summary: Main Features     Advises on the likelihood emails will be interpreted as spam.      Tracks the extent to which emails are ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/10/snapshot-pivotal-veracity-email-deliverability/ A new standard to provide for interoperability of content management systems has been launched. It's called "CMIS", for Content Management Interoperability Services. Summary:      Organizations often maintain a number of different content management systems      These are often maintained by different departments, and are often application-specific      There's a need for the repositories to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/09/cmis-standard-announced/ BizCom has a new hosted Exchange/OCS/SharePoint offering. Summary of Capabilities      Hosted email, instant messaging, teamspace using Microsoft Exchange/OCS/SharePoint.      Also provides integrated archiving, BlackBerry/Goodmail support.      Available since July 2007.      Based on Microsoft's code. Illustrative Pricing      $10 to $15/user/month for Exchange.      $9.95/user/month for BlackBerry.      Current promotional offer: archiving plus 500MB storage for $19.95/user/month; normally ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/08/bizcom-hosted-exchangeocssharepoint/ You may recall our recent cautionary tale about DNS configuration. Adding a CNAME record to a domain can cause some mail servers to ignore the MX records. Instead, they simply follow the CNAME pointer and try to deliver the email there. In our example, they tried to deliver email to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/08/why-you-shouldnt-mix-cname-and-mx/ Here's a cautionary tale about DNS configuration. A chap who shall remain nameless recently reconfigured his domain, in a way that caused some of his incoming email to go missing. He controlled the domain example.com, which was set up something like this: example.com.A1.2.3.4 www.example.com.A1.2.3.4 mail.example.com.A1.2.3.5 example.com.MXmail.example.com. If you already understand how DNS records work, this is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/07/beware-using-cname-and-mx-at-the-same-time/ Blancco offers data erasure tools. This area will soon be seen as important for compliance and archiving purposes. Capabilities      As readers may be aware, deleting a file is unlikely to really delete the information. Chunks of the information remain. It's hard to get rid of information.      That's what Blancco does. Cutely, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/04/deep-data-erasure-from-blancco/ Dimension Data is a $3.7B systems integrator. It has a major international presence (40+ countries and 10,600 staff) and has built much of its success implementing and running Cisco-based IP telephony. In short, it knows a lot about modern telephony. Over the last few years, it has been building expertise around ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/03/dimension-data-integration-of-microsoft-ocs-and-ip-telephony/ The Sarbanes-Oxley Act affects public companies in the United States. Now similar legislation is affecting listed companies in China. On June 28, 2008, the Chinese Ministry of Finance, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the National Audit Office, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission jointly announced the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/02/sox-expands-to-china/ Early-stages archiving vendor Mimosa is successfully competing with the archiving market leader, Symantec Enterprise Vault. Ferris has been watching the battle over the last few months; illustrations can be seen here, here, and here. It appears that Mimosa is gathering momentum and taking plenty of deals from Symantec. In 2008, Mimosa ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/09/01/mimosa-battles-symantec/ Business Value of Proofpoint's Offerings     Suppresses spam and email-borne viruses, so users time isn't wasted. Helps ensure sensitive information (e.g., customer bank account numbers, intellectual property) isn't sent to people it shouldn't be sent to.      Archiving of emails, for easy search and access, to respond better to lawsuits, and to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/28/snapshotproofpoint-spam-and-virus-control-dlp-archiving/ Suddenly, things are getting interesting again in the Exchange alternatives market. The quintessential growth-by-acquisition specialist, Cisco, has just announced that it's acquiring PostPath. Once again, Cisco makes a sound investment in an email technology vendor. Just like it did with IronPort. Great choice. PostPath is the vendor who reverse-engineered the Exchange client protocol, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/27/cisco-to-buy-exchange-alternative-vendor-postpath/ Kaspersky is a successful second-tier anti-virus vendor. The company has flourished by producing anti-virus signatures faster than its competitors. Marketing so far has been informal, spread primarily by word of mouth and the electronic equivalent. Here's an update:      Main services: virus control, riskware/adware/pornware control, spyware control, spam and banner advertising ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/26/kaspersky-update/ On August 12, 2008, Return Path announced it will buy Habeas. What Return Path and Habeas do: Return Path and Habeas offer technology and consulting to help: Senders of email maximize the chance that their emails get through spam filters. ISPs and other service providers improve their abilities to catch spam. The core of this ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/25/return-path-buys-habeas/ On June 24, 2008, Proofpoint announced it bought Fortiva. Proofpoint background: Technology mainly provides: Email-based spam, phishing, and virus control, and policy-based encryption. Filtering of outbound information to prevent data leaks. This covers many types of content, including email and attachments, webmail, files, FTP, instant messaging, and blog postings. Embodied as customer-premises software, customer-premises appliance, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/24/proofpoint-buys-fortiva/ Cast your mind back to the dark ages of 2005. It was three years ago that Microsoft acquired FrontBridge, a hosted -- or managed -- email security service provider in the same mold as Postini and MessageLabs. Since then, Postini was also acquired (by Google), BlackSpider is now part of ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/21/microsoft-it-starts-using-exchange-hosted-services/ GFI sells a variety of tools, one of which is MailArchiver for Exchange. Summary of Capabilities     Customer-installed archiving for MS Exchange.      Available since December 2004. Illustrative Pricing      $324 for 25 seats; $1,296 for 200 seats; $4,320 for 500 seats; $3,780 for 1,000 seats.      After first year, maintenance is 20% of purchase price.      For ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/20/gfis-email-archiving-snapshot/ It is easy to assume that deploying a myriad of electronic surveillance technologies (e.g., data leak protection, logging, archiving, firewalls, event data recorders, etc.) is sufficient on its own, providing organizations with a hundred sets of "electronic eyes" constantly watching for breaches of compliance, leaks of intellectual property, rogue employees, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/19/the-human-factor-in-compliance/ Hitherto, mobile email for businesspeople has been provided via technologies such as those from RIM and Windows Mobile. Consumer email has been handled by other technologies. Longer term, the separation will probably erode:      Users will want a very powerful handheld for their own purposes. Their personal needs will generally require ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/18/business-and-consumer-cell-phones-merging/ If you process, store, or transmit credit card data for any reasons in your company, you must be Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) compliant or your company risks fines or even loss of the ability to process credit card information. Yet, we regularly hear of companies that handle ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/17/companies-concerned-with-pci-dss-compliance-need-dlp/ In our world, reality and virtual reality are coalescing at an alarming rate. On a simple level, we enter instant messaging (IM) conversations with those in the same office as ours, preferring a virtual conversation to a physical one. On the other end of the spectrum, we can invent characters ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/14/compliance-in-virtual-worlds-extension-of-identity-management/ For a while now, Microsoft and its larger consulting partners -- such as HP -- have been telling customers that direct-attached storage makes a lot more sense than shared disk arrays for their Exchange mailbox stores. This has been greeted with a certain amount of incredulity in some quarters. However, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/14/microsoft-it-stops-using-sans-for-exchange/ Unison is a new unified communications offering:      Provides email, directory, IM, voice, voicemail, calendar, contacts, virus control (ClamAV), spam control (SpamAssassin), and backup.      Voice/voicemail is a complete PBX offering running on the server.      Server end runs on customer-installed standard PC hardware.      User interface is a rich Windows client--in the future ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/13/unison-a-new-unified-communications-offering/ Orange Legal Technologies offers a hosted e-discovery service:      Key components, in EDRM terms, are:          Analysis. Gathering relevant information.          Processing. Doing things like making attachments readable, extracting metadata, deduplication, converting to standard formats such as PDF or TIFF.          Review. Sifting through the material to determine ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/13/orange-legal-technologies-hosted-e-discovery/ Sonian Networks offers a hosted email archiving service, available since February 2008:     Works with Exchange, Lotus, GroupWise, Ipswitch.     Main competitors are Google/Postini, Dell/MessageOne, Proofpoint/Fortiva, LiveOffice.     Sees its main competitive strengths as:          Low price: $3/month for unlimited storage (granted, Google Apps is similar).          Scalability: Built on Amazon's cloud architecture.          Easy to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/12/sonians-hosted-archiving/ For a while now, Microsoft and its larger consulting partners -- such as HP -- have been telling customers that direct-attached storage (DAS) makes a lot more sense than shared disk arrays for their Exchange mailbox stores. This has been greeted with a certain amount of incredulity in some quarters. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/12/das-vs-sans-for-exchange/ Leading commercial wiki vendor Socialtext has just added spreadsheet support. This is a very interesting development and substantially enhances the value of a wiki. For example: Spreadsheets are used as a convenient tool for many nonfinancial applications, such as simple databases and presentation graphics. Multiple people can work on the same spreadsheet. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/11/socialtext-adds-spreadsheet-to-wiki-socialtext-wiki-gets-built-in-spreadsheets/ The correct classification of certain types of electronically stored information (ESI) is important. It's a big help with things like:      Information retrieval, access control, and retention/deletion.      Compliance and policy enforcement.      Data security: to prevent inadvertent disclosure and trigger encryption.      Protection of intellectual property. Ideally, ESI is automatically classified. However, this is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/11/titus-labs-classification-update/ Archiving products for email have been around for a while now, and customers often need to consolidate archiving systems, or move from one archiving platform to another. This is due to:      Mergers or reorganizations      The need for more modern technology These migrations are usually painful, time-consuming, and costly. The easiest way ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/10/useful-tool-for-consolidatingmigrating-archives/ Many of you will be familiar with the work of Ivan Pavlov, in which he determined that certain reflex responses -- like a dog salivating before his normal mealtime -- occur conditionally based on one's previous experiences. We believe there is something to his research that can be applied to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/10/email-overload-pavlovs-dogs-and-your-inbox/ Protecting your company against intentional leaks is virtually impossible. If a rogue employee wants to steal sensitive data from your organization, here are just some of the ways it can be done. The employee could:      Take a digital photo of the document on screen and walk out with the camera.      Call ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/07/data-leak-protection-focus-on-inadvertent-leaks/ In another high profile case, federal prosecutors are using email in their case against senior managers of Bear Stearns. Two things are interesting here. First is that the email in question is from a personal email account. Work email is understood to be the company's property, but now it seems personal ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/07/prosecutors-build-case-on-email/ Will we ever know the truth behind the White House’s shenanigans around the lost emails to do with the Valerie Plame affair? According to this CNN story, the White House is using exemption from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a rebuttal to the latest attempt by Citizens for ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/06/email-archiving-the-white-house-and-the-need-for-privacy/ An important feature of email archiving is called "stubbing." This is a process whereby an entire email or just the attachment is removed from Exchange and replaced with a "stub" file. When the user opens the message in Outlook, the stub file retrieves the archived email and/or attachment from the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/06/microsoft-recommends-against-stubbing/ The number of desktop email clients in widespread use appears to be decreasing (although there are many clients available). The increasing use of Webmail interfaces (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail/Live, etc.) is arguably an influence on this. We believe a key reason is that the major platforms all have a first-rate "default" interface, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/05/desktop-email-has-coalesced/ On July 31, 2008, McAfee announced it will buy Reconnex. The deal closed on August 14, 2008. Buyer McAfee Background Current security offering consists of: virus and malware control, spam control, phishing and spyware control, surf control/URL filtering, and malicious web site protection Along with Symantec and Trend, McAfee is one of the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/04/mcafee-buys-reconnex/ Most identity management systems focus on handling "normal" users. Many servers, network routers, databases, and workstations have special privileged accounts. A high percentage of security breaches come from inside staff misusing such privileged accounts. These are handled badly by identity management systems, because they are general-purpose accounts that will be ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/04/cyber-ark-management-of-privileged-passwords/ Some time ago we highlighted the new e-discovery Special Master persona. As the e-discovery market continues to evolve, Law.com recently wrote about another relatively new persona, the "e-discovery attorney". E-discovery attorneys are those with a clear understanding of e-discovery process and technologies, and significant hands-on experience in this complex area. While ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/04/e-discovery-attorneys/ PSS Systems--a vendor of legal hold and retention policy solutions, announced earlier this week that it has secured $18M in financing. PSS has several solutions:      Atlas LCC, for legal holds, and custodian and collection management      Atlas ERM, for enterprise retention policy management      Atlas Map, for synchronizing systems and people with legal ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/03/pss-systems-raises-18m/ If you're interested in retention and preservation, bookmark this page. The CGOC provides events, working groups, and an annual summit on retention and preservation. The resources made available on the CGOC Portal are top-notch. Registering is well worthwhile. You'll find numerous documents written by experts in the e-discovery industry, a discussion ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/08/03/cgoc-interesting-forum-on-retention-and-preservation/ Common sense tells us that large mailboxes will slow the performance of Exchange Server. But are you aware that item count is the real nemesis of Exchange performance? We recently found this TechNet article, which does an excellent job of explaining the difference between mailbox size and item count -- ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/31/item-counts-impact-exchange-performance/ LiveOffice, a hosted email archiving service, has an interesting trade-off between functionality and user friendliness. The service is typically used by organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees. So it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that a large organization needs. For example:      Search is mainly oriented to keywords, and standard ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/31/liveoffice-interesting-trade-offs/ Some countries, such as Belgium, have deployed national identity cards, and many others will follow suit. There was an intriguing discussion on mobile identity at the European e-Identity Conference in The Hague. Mobile phones are an interesting alternative to conventional cards. Technically, they work well, as they can hold a smart ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/30/mobile-phones-as-identity-cards/ If you're like many in the corporate world, you probably spend a substantial amount of time triaging your email. Afraid to miss an important email, you likely use a combination of rules, folders, flags, and categories in your triage. Some of you are "filers," placing email neatly in a carefully ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/29/email-overload-inbox-whack-a-mole-and-archiving/ Google-like searches, where you plug in a few keywords, are too crude. The systems come up with too many options. Search tools need to make it easy to provide additional information that depends on the context and nature of the material being searched; for example, date ranges, who's involved, and concepts ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/29/google-like-searches-too-crude/ Users are accustomed to documents being put into a document management system (DMS), so that others will be able to see the document. That's the sort of application for which these systems have been designed. But when it comes to putting their email into a corporate archive, some users freak out. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/28/acls-important-for-email-dms/ I just returned from my business trip to Japan. Like many travelers, I was dismayed by the maze of communication technologies necessary to be in touch with business contacts, friends, and family during my stay. On the flight home, I dreamed about the perfect worldwide communication technology:      No expensive long-distance phone ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/28/communication-wish-list/ Often, fully automatic categorization of electronically stored information is insufficient. The alternative, manual classification, has challenges when it comes to accuracy and keeping up with the pace at which ESI is created. If it's being done for a user's own purposes, such as when someone stores email in a folder, the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/27/manual-categorization-has-accuracy-challenges/ There is a new phenomenon happening behind closed doors in the corporate world. We call it email bankruptcy. To illustrate, we would challenge you to an experiment. Assuming your email policies allow this, we dare you to simply delete all the email in your inbox that is older than three days ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/24/email-overload-declaring-email-bankruptcy/ There's an argument that says: Keeping information in the right folders is too much work. Plus, you always want to look at the same information in other ways, and having it kept in folders makes it harder to find. So don't bother foldering. Instead, expect to use a search engine. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/24/foldering-vs-search/ EEMA was founded in 1987 as the European Electronic Messaging Association, mirroring the now-defunct EMA. EEMA has continued with a loyal group of supporters and shifted focus with industry trends. Its focus is now Electronic Identity, and we just attended the two-day European e-Identity Conference in The Hague. EEMA is outsourcing ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/23/eema-has-found-a-new-role/ Today, courts sometimes ask parties to a suit to justify the relevance and accuracy of their search algorithms. That's a problem:     You can't explain the algorithm, because the search vendor doesn't reveal its proprietary secrets.     Even if the vendor were to explain its algorithms, chances are a cocktail of approaches are used ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/22/courts-will-tolerate-search-inaccuracies/ I feel like I'm in the popular movie starring Bill Murray. I've just spent my first week in Japan working with my Japanese business partners. One of the enjoyable parts of the trip has been observing Japanese customs. In particular, I have found their use of cell phones to be quite ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/21/lost-in-translation-cell-phone-use-in-japan/ McAfee has a successful virus control business, over $1B/year in revenues. The firm has made various investments in other types of content control over the last five years. Now it's placing major emphasis on its efforts. Summarizing the technology:     Provides:          Virus and malware control.          Spam control.          Phishing and spyware ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/20/mcafee-update/ Marshal Software released its Secure Email Server. In summary:      Sits at the Internet boundary.      Opens incoming encrypted email, checks that it conforms to policy, and sends on to the user (if necessary re-encrypting).      Encrypts outgoing email based on policy, and sends on to recipient.      Uses public key cryptography.      Works with ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/17/mailmarshal-secure-email-server/ LiveOffice specializes in messaging compliance solutions for financial services. The company has had success in this niche, and is now moving to provide services to the world outside of financial services. It recently launched LiveOffice Mail Archive, a hosted email archiving offering. In summary:     Provides archiving, e-discovery, and compliance services.     Aimed at small ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/17/hosted-archiving-service-from-liveoffice/ Today, it's IT's job to define information leakage policy within an organization. This isn't right. IT can't do a good job with this alone. Teamwork is needed among IT and user departments in order to determine what the policies should be. This is easier said than done. Many user departments are evasive, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/16/dlp-lob-users-must-help-it-in-policy-definition/ Over the coming weeks we will be blogging a series on email and information overload. As part of this series, we will be running some quizzes, and also posting some challenges. We are very interested in hearing from you on the following questions. Send your responses to david.sengupta@ferris.com (if you wish ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/16/email-overload-are-you-affected/ Many people want to use the BlackBerry as their mobile device. This presents a problem for hosted Exchange vendors. Say they charge $15/month for support. RIM charges the service provider $3-$5/month for the use of a BES Server. This means the end user gets charged around an extra $10/month for mobile ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/15/blackberry-support-expensive-for-hosted-exchange/ In 2006, U.S. consumers received about 800 million text messages that they identified as "spam." In 2007, we estimated the total was around 1.1 billion. Our estimate for 2008 is 1.5 billion. At first sight, these numbers sound large, but remember that this is over an entire year and that there ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/14/sms-text-message-spam-is-a-minor-problem/ Anybody can put together simple data leak prevention policies, like filtering out any 10-digit phone numbers, or anything with a set of sensitivity words like "Confidential." However, many policies turn out to need a lot of thought in order to define them, so that:      You catch most of the stuff you ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/14/dlp-users-need-help-with-policy-definition/ Cemaphore has been extending its continuity solutions to Google. In so doing, it has developed a way you can replace Exchange servers by Gmail. MailShadow for GoogleApps lets you use Outlook as a front end to Gmail. As the software develops, Cemaphore plans to provide a very high level of compatibility ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/13/cemaphores-outlook-front-end-to-google/ When a data leak prevention product tells you you're contravening policy, chances are you get a message like: "Policy violation: You're trying to send sensitive material to someone who shouldn't receive it." This may be alright for simple policies. But, in general, users need more specific information about what's gone wrong, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/10/dlp-user-notices-too-crude/ Are you feeling saturated with all the tools that are supposed to make life better (email, cell phone, IM, etc.)? Do you feel as if your work performance is lagging as a result? If so, then I recommend you take a look at this thought-provoking book by Maggie Jackson, "Distracted: ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/09/are-you-feeling-distracted/ RPost has an interesting e-contracting service:      Getting contracts signed is a big pain. You email documents, the recipients have to print them, maybe they don't have a printer handy, then they sign the document, post it back, or they scan it and email it back, and things get lost sometimes, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/08/rpost-speeds-contract-fulfillment/ When companies do competitive bake-offs, they generally apply simple tests. For example, they look for credit card numbers, a customer account number, or keywords. These tests are not a good indication of how well a product will do in practice, because many policies will end up having to be far more ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/07/testing-dlp-policies-in-competitive-bake-offs/ Updated July 8: the price changed slightly between when we were briefed and the announcement.  On July 7 8, Microsoft formally announced its new Online hosted services. These are "in the cloud", or software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of Exchange and SharePoint (not to be confused with Exchange Hosted Services, which is the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/06/microsoft-online-hosted-services-too-expensive/ On July 7 8, Microsoft formally announced its new Online hosted services. These are "in the cloud", or software-as-a-service (SaaS) implementations of Exchange and SharePoint (not to be confused with Exchange Hosted Services, which is the hosted email security service formerly from Frontbridge). Microsoft first announced this more than a year ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/06/finally-microsoft-online-hosted-services/ Intradyn is an email archiving vendor. Here's a quick summary:     Sells two products:          Orca Email Archiver, aimed at organizations with up to about 500 employees. The active archive is not expandable beyond hard disk capacity (.5GB & 1TB), except you can offload older emails to tape and retain metadata searchable ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/02/intradyn-email-archiving/ It's hard to filter out pornographic images. Clearswift is an early player in this field, and probably offers one of the best filters, which it calls ImageManager. As a practical matter, ImageManager catches about 80% or so of porn images. The problem is that things like kitchen cabinets can be hard ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/02/hard-to-filter-out-porn-images/ In a recent Wall Street Journal article, it was announced that JetBlue Airways Corp.'s LiveTV Unit has agreed to buy Verizon Communications Inc.'s Airfone network. Airfone owns and operates 100 air-to-ground communications towers in the continental United States. The move will boost LiveTV's ability to offer email and other broadband ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/01/jetblue-to-push-email/ The mechanisms used to define policy definition are one of the most important things to consider when evaluating a data loss prevention technology. Amazingly, only about 25% of prospective customers cross-examine DLP vendors on this topic. That's a big mistake. Ask your vendor to provide a demo. Then take some policies ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/07/01/policy-definition-key-dlp-evaluation-criteria/ In a 5/16/08 Reuters interview, Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said that he expects more and more companies to abandon their in-house messaging systems and shift to "cloud computing" as a less expensive alternative. Capossela made the claim that, "in five years 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/30/microsoft-pushes-for-exchange-online/ Orchestria is a leading vendor of data leak prevention technology. The company has a nicely schizophrenic approach to policy definition. There are two user interfaces:     One for the nasty bits, where you use a human-unfriendly scripting language to define the catch filters and such.     One that defines the easier things, like whether ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/29/orchestrias-schizophrenic-dlp-policy-definition/ Given that Exchange 2007 was released more than a year ago and is a stable product, you might think everyone has already moved to it. In fact, organizations have a number of reasons for postponing the move. Samples of what I hear are:     My current Exchange 2003 system is working fine.     The ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/26/why-customers-dont-move-to-exchange-2007-overnight/ When evaluating and implementing data leak prevention (DLP) technology, you need to have realistic expectations about accuracy. Policy definition is crude today, and you end up with stuff not being caught that should ideally be caught, and stuff being caught that shouldn't be caught. Vendors know about this, although only the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/25/be-cautious-about-dlp-accuracy/ There's a specialized world of vendors that sell messaging software to service providers. We recently visited Bizanga, one of the newer players in that field. In summary:     Company sells software that provides a variety of services. The most important are spam control and malware control; after that come encryption, archiving, certification, and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/24/bizanga-update/ Summary:     FTI is a professional services business, with about 2,000 professionals and 3,000 employees. 2007 revenues were about $1 billion.     Ferris Research estimates about 20% of its business is litigation consulting.     Ferris Research estimates about 20% of its business is Ringtail e-discovery software, delivered as a service or packaged software. This provides for ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/23/fti-buys-attenex/ PublicFTP has a useful hosted FTP service. In summary:     $1 per GB to deposit.     $2 per month subscription.     Use any FTP client to upload files.     Users don't have to have an FTP client to download.     Very simple interface with no advertising. Competitors include ADrive, Dropbox, ExaVault, and FileDropper. Many of these services started being offered for no ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/22/useful-hosted-ftp-service/ CaseCentral offers a hosted service that helps companies and law firms manage litigation cases. In summary: Company historically sells to law firms; now it also has a focus on selling direct to corporate IT and in-house counsel. CaseCentral provides immediate access to previously collected ESI for early case assessment, and culls/processes down applicable ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/19/casecentral-e-disco-vendor-update/ Migrating between email systems is a substantial project, and specialized tools, such as those from Quest, are available to facilitate the process. It turns out that if you install an email archiving system, easier migration is a side benefit. Much of the heavy lifting has already been done. Archiving vendor AXS-One ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/19/axs-one-archiving-facilitates-notes-exchange-migrations/ Managing Exchange distribution lists starts to get burdensome at about 250 mailboxes. By 10,000 mailboxes, it gets really painful. For example:     You end up with lots of old, unused DLs that nobody knows anything about.     People have a hard time getting off old DLs.     Plenty of time must be spent managing the moves ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/18/imanami-dl-management-for-exchange/ What are the storage consequences of email archiving? Email servers send and receive hundreds of emails per day per user. Using an average size of 100KB, a single user can easily generate tens-of-megabytes of new data daily. Even a small organization faces a total email load of hundreds-of-megabytes per day. Larger ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/17/the-storage-impact-of-email-archiving/ Here's an update on Orchestria, which sells content control software:     Product filters many types of info: emails, instant messages, files at rest, Web traffic, etc.     Filters are at Internet boundary; end points such as printers, file systems, USB drives; and internal servers.     Company has had great success in financial services and insurance verticals, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/16/orchestria-update/ We recently talked to Bizanga, maker of email boundary appliances for service providers. Bizanga's Intelligent Message Processor (IMP) products are based on hardware from IBM, HP, and Sun, and used by organizations such as Cox Communications. IMP lets service providers slot in their preferred options for spam control, malware control, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/15/bizanga-imp-35-scalable-email-appliance-for-isps/ Data leak protection (DLP) technology is valuable, and will be widely used. All the same, it's important to get expectations right. DLP will always be leaky. It will be useful to stop most employees from doing things they shouldn't do, most of the time. But in particular, it won't stop malicious ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/12/dlp-will-always-be-leaky/ E-Discovery vendor Electronic Evidence Discovery will buy Daticon. In a nutshell:     EED has a hosted litigation support system, plus offers complementary professional services.     EED is starting to sell packaged litigation support software direct to corporations.     EED focuses on large cases.     Daticon's focus is on e-discovery professional services.     Main motivators for EED are:          Much stronger ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/11/eed-buys-daticon/ From time to time, email systems are down. We all depend on email, and most people more so than the telephone. Large organizations can invest in redundant systems and special features to enhance reliability, but most organizations put up with periodic outages. They're much more tolerant of email outages than telephone ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/10/tolerance-for-email-unreliability/ Recommind has tools that help lawyers review and assess a corpus of electronic information. We were recently updated by the firm. Here's a quick summary:     Product offerings:          Concept search across many types of electronic information: MindServer Enterprise Search          Automatic document assessment tool: Axcelerate eDiscovery          Add-on applications for MindServer ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/09/recommind-search-for-lawyers/ Microsoft is making big claims around its Exchange Online initiatives. Senior Vice President Chris Capossela recently predicted that by mid-2013, half of all Exchange mailboxes will be hosted on Microsoft's Exchange Online. Chris points out that many of these will move from Notes. Chris's prediction suggests around 150 million mailboxes ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/08/thoughts-on-exchange-online/ We were recently briefed by MessageSolution, a new-ish archiving vendor. In summary:     Email (Exchange, Notes/Domino, GroupWise) and file archiving.     Packaged software; runs under Windows, Linux, Solaris.     Started in Linux market.     Product on market since 2004.     90 staff, of which 90% are in development in China or Taiwan.     $4 million-$5 million revenues; profitable. MessageSolution thinks its competitive strengths ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/05/messagesolution-email-and-file-archiving/ On Spring vacation in Hawaii, one's idle thoughts trip naturally to a close perusal of Google's Gmail license agreement. The agreement grants generous republication rights to Google:      Section 11.1 states: By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/04/google-can-publish-your-content-freely/ Web 2.0 technologies provide a plethora of places that data can reside. These present substantial compliance challenges. For example, it will be hard to know where all of your company’s data is, and whether and how intellectual property has escaped your organization today. Fast-forward five years. Imagine hosting some of your ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/03/compliance-in-a-web-20-world/ Alt-N has just released its SecurityGateway. In summary:      Anti-virus, anti-spam, phishing control, etc.      Also filters outgoing email for customer-defined policy compliance.      Works with Exchange and any SMTP messaging server.      Runs under Windows on customer-supplied server.      Typical customers will have 50 to 250 mailboxes; the product scales to 5,000+ mailboxes.      Pricing ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/02/alt-ns-security-gateway/ Plenty of laws and regulations place privacy constraints on electronic information, such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. Information is transferred in many ways, and file transfer via email is one of the most common. From the privacy compliance standpoint, email-based file transfer is a problem. For example:      There's no ability to define ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/06/01/file-transfer-privacy-compliance-problem/ Click Here to Participate We are doing a survey of users of archiving products (e.g., EMC Legato, Symantec Vault, Zantaz/Autonomy), to see how good the products are in practice. We'll use the information to produce a Consumer Reports-style comparative assessment. If you are using an electronic archiving product or service and would ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/29/archiving-products-survey/ Expanding on: Steve Kille's recent bulletin about IP reputation. SPF isn't exactly a "reputation mechanism" -- although it can be used to help identify the sender, in order to make improved reputation-based decisions. SPF, DKIM, and other "sender authentication" schemes help a receiving MTA decide if it knows which domain sent ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/28/a-clarification-about-spf-and-ip-reputation/ The normal way of transferring files is by email, or, after that, by instant messaging. For small files, up to say 5MB or so, these vehicles are fine. Above that, file size and transfer times create problems. Ignoring some of the niceties, use of FTP, the file transfer protocol, is the main ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/27/ftp-importance-growing/ We were recently updated by Ipswitch. We've tracked the firm for some years because of its email offering. In summary: Today's main offerings: IMail, Windows-based POP/IMAP email. Roughly 15% of revenues. WS_FTP, high-functionality FTP client and server file transfer. Roughly 35% of revenues. WhatsUp, network monitoring. Roughly 50% of revenues. Revenues not disclosed, Ferris Research estimates ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/25/ipswitch-update/ Records managers are responsible for the storage of corporate records. Traditionally, they store lots of paper documents, and ensure those records are kept for appropriate periods of time before being destroyed. Perhaps their most important trade organization is ARMA International. Nowadays, most records are kept in electronic form. Unfortunately, most records ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/22/records-managers-dont-understand-it/ A corporate record is defined as something along the following lines: a document that records a transaction or event that's significant to the organization concerned, such as a tax return or an insurance contract. Or, more formally, the ISO defines records as "information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/21/it-staff-dont-understand-what-a-record-is/ Laws, regulations, and internal policies dictate how long electronic information should be kept. A typical organization will have to manage many such retention policies. Doing so is difficult enough when you just have to deal with formal paper records, such as financial returns or customer contracts. When it comes to handling ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/20/records-retention-policies-to-go-away/ Nick Mehta, formerly boss of Symantec's Enterprise Vault business, left Symantec about six months ago. After investigating the possibilities, he's just joined LiveOffice as CEO. This is good for LiveOffice, and for Nick. Summary of LiveOffice:      SaaS archiving and messaging solutions for SMBs or organizations with limited IT staff.      Historical focus ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/19/nick-mehta-joins-liveoffice/ According to this article, outsourcing services to India and other less expensive offshore labor pools has recently expanded to legal services. Mindcrest employs 459 lawyers in Pune, India. The Indian lawyers are trained in the same common-law and business principles as British, Canadian, and U.S. lawyers. On one hand, the cost ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/15/india-compliance-and-dlp/ Richi Jennings noted in a recent bulletin the claim from BorderWare of getting 98.3% detection using IP Reputation (DNSRBLs), and that other sources suggested 75%. Isode has been making measurements of false negative rates, published in a white paper, "Measuring the False Negative Rate for Isode's M-Switch Anti-Spam." Our measurements suggest that ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/13/measuring-false-negatives-and-ip-reputation/ We were recently briefed by Abaca, a vendor of spam control technology, on its proprietary ReceiverNet spam control algorithm. Abaca makes impressive claims for the accuracy and performance of ReceiverNet. The underlying algorithms have been explained to us under NDA, and they are very interesting. In essence -- and at ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/13/abaca-receivernet-interesting-spam-control-technique/ Whiteboarding is the ability to work on shared files on an on-screen "shared notebook" or "whiteboard." Whiteboarding is available in many Web services; for example, it is a part of the WebEx Web conferencing system and in tools such as Microsoft NetMeeting. The clear benefit to a standardized approach to whiteboarding ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/11/xmpp-is-future-direction-for-whiteboarding/ Whether or not you or I believe BorderWare's amazing claim that it filters 98% of spam using reputation alone, it's clear that reputation is increasingly important. No surprise there, but what's the implication on legitimate email users? As more and more spam filtering relies on your reputation as an email sender, your ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/07/your-reputation-in-peril-use-outbound-spam-filtering/ Web conferencing is a valuable Internet technology that allows users to connect globally, sharing files, presentations, and any software running on the desktop. Major players in this market are WebEx (recently purchased by Cisco), Microsoft LiveMeeting, and Citrix GoToMeeting. WebEx, LiveMeeting, and GoToMeeting are fee-based services sold to enterprises. Now a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/06/dimdim-web-conferencing-gets-high-marks/ BorderWare is making a very interesting claim. It seems to be blocking an enormous proportion of its customers' inbound spam simply using IP reputation. While most anti-spam vendors these days talk about blocking roughly 75% of the spam using IP reputation (basically a fancy word for DNSBLs), BorderWare's quoted statistic is ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/05/borderware-claims-amazing-reputation-filtering/ Splunk won "Best of Interop" in the Network Management, Software, and Services category. With more than 450 enterprise customers and a lot of momentum, this is a company to watch. Splunk brands itself as "IT Search" with the ability to search log files, configuration files, messages, traps, alerts, scripts, and metrics. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/04/splunk-useful-compliance-and-ed-tool/ Moore's Law discusses the exponential growth of electronic circuits. Perhaps email is another case where Moore's Law applies. Consider email quantity. Where once we sent and received only a handful of emails daily, today we routinely send and receive hundreds of emails. You might argue that the volumes are increasing exponentially. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/05/01/email-and-moores-law/ I attended Microsoft's inaugural INTERACT2008 conference in San Diego earlier in April. While Office Communications Server (OCS) was the clear focal point for the event, Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2007 received good coverage as well. Two tidbits I noted from a compliance standpoint:     Microsoft Exchange team has adopted a Protect, Preserve, Discover, Prove ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/29/compliance-notes-from-microsoft-interact2008/ I moderated a webinar earlier this week. It was intended to be a press-only event, to support Abaca's recent launch of ReceiverNet. Inevitably with these things, a few non-press register, but that's perfectly OK. The thing that really surprised me was that non-press outnumbered the press folks two-to-one. There also seems ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/24/media-bored-with-spam/ You're probably flooded with inbound emails. Managing thousands of emails is time consuming, error prone and extremely frustrating. Plus it diverts you from more important tasks. Two new tools aim to make life easier. The first is ClearContext. Its product is named Information Management System (IMS). This is an Outlook add-on ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/23/tools-to-manage-email-overload/ Attachments are one of the reasons for Exchange storage growth. People use Exchange email to send files to co-workers and customers, and depending on the file content (e.g., text, pictures, audio, video), these files can be quite large. Files in the 30MB-50MB range are becoming common. This causes rapid Exchange ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/22/sending-large-attachments-with-exchange/ ClamAV is an open source, free anti-virus tool, designed for email scanning on mail gateways. It is owned by Sourcefire, which employs the ClamAV developers and provides commercial support for ClamAV. The most important capability of an anti-virus product is to be able to remove a high percentage of viruses, including rapid ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/21/clamav-useful-free-anti-virus/ This was sent to me anonymously. However, it seems reliable and well-founded. "Zantaz had a couple more layoffs this year across multiple departments such as QA, engineering and services. People also have been leaving voluntarily at all levels from Boston and Pleasanton office. More people will leave, especially from the Boston ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/19/zantaz-layoffs-2/ Trend Micro takes an unusual approach with its hosted/managed/in-the-cloud email security service. Rather than trying to do everything, it sticks to what a service is good at. Trend is applying the 80/20 rule. It promotes a hybrid approach, with the hosted service implementing only a first level of spam filtering based ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/17/trend-micros-hybrid-hosted-service/ We recently talked to Voltage Security, which announced something called "Connected VSN." VSN is the Voltage Security Network, and it isn't new. It's a hosted service that implements the key management for Voltage-style identity-based encryption (IBE). The idea is that instead of on-premise key management, you centralize the key generation in ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/16/voltages-hybrid-encryption-service/ IronKey isn't just another encrypted USB flash-drive-key-stick-thingy. For a start, the company makes a big thing of its claim that IronKey is the only such device designed from the get-go to be secure (as opposed to a flash drive that's had security "bolted-on," presumably). It's an interesting claim, but of arguable ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/15/ironkey-encrypted-usb-flash-drive-on-steroids/ 2factor is primarily an encryption technology licensing business: The company sells its technology to OEMs. The core technology is called Real Privacy Management (RPM). It works by calculating symmetric private keys; that is, it doesn't use a public/private key pair. Each party in a transaction has a private key, which it ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/14/2factors-interesting-encryption-technology/ Proofpoint has a new VP of marketing, and not a moment too soon. Andrew Lochart is the first to admit that his new employer has been very quiet recently, and he aims to change that. Aside from the recent $20 million funding round and the additional 40 employees hired already this ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/13/proofpoint-still-here/ Google has joined the list of vendors of email archiving and e-discovery. The firm recently announced its Google Message Discovery service. The service is part of the corporate offerings acquired with the purchase of Postini. Hosted email archiving solutions like Google's compete with in-house email archive solutions on cost and quick ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/09/google-gets-email-discovery/ For the last few years, Exchange databases have grown in size, to the extent that performance has suffered, and there has been an increased risk of service disruption. Consider how Exchange has evolved. When mailboxes were tens of gigabytes in size, hundreds of mailboxes could be managed on a single CPU ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/08/exchange-storage-challenges/ David Ferris recently wrote a bulletin about several interesting aspects of the Fortiva archiving solutions. I thought that our readers might be interested in a little more technical detail. The architects of an archival and e-discovery product or service have to solve a number of difficult technical problems. These include, but ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/07/fortiva-technical-review/ Here's an update on Attenex--one of the leaders in tools that let you sift through a corpus of electronic information to work out what's relevant to a legal matter: Main offering is Attenex Patterns Suite, which accounts for 95% of Attenex's revenues. Patterns Suite lets you take ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/06/attenex-update/ S/MIME is an Internet standard for secure email, specified in RFC 3851 "Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) Version 3.1 Message Specifications," and is based on the security provided by Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) specified in RFC 3852. I recently set up S/MIME for exchange of sensitive documents with a person in ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/03/smime-useful-for-secure-email/ Today, everyone worries about what to archive. For example, should you keep drafts of documents? Personal communications? I think we'll end up archiving everything, except egregious garbage like spam:      It's too hard to get users to conform to policy.      Automated methods of capturing a human-understandable policy, for example "tax records," are ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/02/expect-to-archive-everything/ HP recently gave us an update on its Integrated Achive Platform, formerly known as RISS. In summary:      It always comes bundled with pre-integrated HP hardware.      IAP is a core repository that then has interfaces to support a number of data structures.      Data structure interfaces include Exchange, Notes/Domino, relational databases, file systems, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/04/01/hps-integrated-archive-platform/ Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) was developed by Phil Zimmerman in 1991 to enable secure exchange of documents and email. Security is based on standard cryptography and a "web of trust." PGP was freely distributed, and used by many. An Internet standard for email using PGP is specified in RFC 2015 ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/31/pgp-email-in-decline/ We are about to achieve virtual immortality. Recently, Lazare Ponticelli, 110 years old, died. He was the last French infantryman left alive from the First World War. With him died the final traces of the rich and complex world of his comrades in the trenches, of his parents, and the vast ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/30/you-dear-reader-are-immortal/ We've just been learning about Lexbe's hosted litigation support. In brief: Does document review and case analysis. Documents can be in PDF, native email, and MS Office formats, or 100 other formats.     Shared case research, case calendars, and other tools. Interestingly, users can build timeline charts/dynamic chronologies; they're automatically maintained. Searches can be enlarged ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/27/lexbes-hosted-litigation-support/ We recently heard from RPost about an add-on to its Registered E-mail service. The new feature is called SideNote, and it seems like a deceptively simple, yet powerful way to improve users' experience when performing everyday email tasks. Imagine a common email workflow: Alice sends email to Bob and wants to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/26/rpost-sidenote-simple-powerful-way-to-improve-email/ Apple recently announced that the iPhone will support Microsoft Exchange. The iPhone is significant for business travelers. Its slick interface and excellent form factor are a major attraction, but the storage capacity is particularly remarkable. It can hold 16GB of data files (32GB for the iPod Touch), making it possible to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/25/iphone-attractive-for-many-business-travelers/ Here's an update on Fortiva, which offers hosted email archiving:      Main service offering is Fortiva Archiving Suite. Email archiving, lots of e-discovery services, storage management. Typical cost is $1-$2/mailbox/month.      SmartStore. This is a subset of the Archiving Suite, with more limited e-discovery capabilities. Typically about $1/month.      Services mainly aimed at ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/24/fortivas-hosted-archiving/ Hosted archiving has a number of obvious attractions, such as:      Fast installation.      Probably lower TCO.      Less use of internal IT staff. Here are some thoughts about requirements for enterprise hosted archiving:      Customer-premises-based encryption/decryption is required, to provide for privacy.      Customer premises appliance or server is required to provide for encryption and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/23/requirements-for-hosted-enterprise-archiving/ Associated Press wrote this story that was widely covered. It concerns the negligent handling of email by the White House. You can read the article to learn the details of the story, but what makes this story interesting is that one of the experts quoted in the article is Mimosa's Bill ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/20/white-houses-email-archiving-negligent/ We were recently updated by Don Massaro, Sendmail's CEO. The firm is evolving a data leak prevention offering. In summary: Embodied as appliance or VMware. Filters email, all main instant messaging protocols, FTP, http. Provides for policy-based monitoring and control at the network boundary. Appliance provides for very high traffic volumes. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/20/sendmails-data-leak-prevention/ It's been several years since psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, who has spent much of his life researching Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), coined the term Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). ADT is characterized by the same symptoms as ADD, however these are brought on through an interrupt-driven lifestyle, and not by birth. Many ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/18/email-overload-attention-deficit-trait-adt/ There is a good choice of Internet standard XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) clients for all common desktop platforms, including decent quality free products. We have not found a good free mobile XMPP client, but Agile Messenger from Agilemobile is a neat commercial one. It is reasonably priced and offers ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/17/agile-messenger-mobile-xmpp-client/ Eliot Spitzer is used to headlines, but not like the one he received this past week regarding involvement in a prostitution ring. But we should all remember his contribution to the email archiving industry when Attorney General of New York State. During his eight-year tenure, Spitzer took on the giants of ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/13/eliot-spitzer-email-archiving-thought-leader/ DKIM--DomainKeys Identified Mail--is an important standard for email sender authentication. It allows a recipient to verify that a message really does come from the sending domain that it claims to have come from. Senders publish a public key for their domain and then cryptographically sign their outgoing email, using the ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/12/dkim-vs-domainkeys-confusion/ We're trying to beef up our sales materials, and your testimonials would be a big help. If you've got anything vaguely good to say about Ferris Research and don't mind expressing this, we would be very grateful if you'd do so in a comment below. Alternatively, if you want anonymity, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/11/please-contribute-ferris-research-testimonials/ Cohesive Knowledge Solutions specializes in helping you deal with email overload. The company has what sounds like a very useful, short book, "The Hamster Revolution" -- a 90-minute read. They also offer corporate training. Examples of useful, practical advice:      Send fewer emails, and you'll receive fewer.      Strengthen subject lines and structure ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/10/useful-guidance-on-email-overload/ Trend Micro has just launched an email archiving product. It's aimed at organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees. Key points are:      Initially works with Exchange 2003. Exchange 2007 and Notes/Domino support will come later in 2008.      Wizards make installation simple.      Protects against people snooping through others' mail.      Search features include: ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/09/rend-micros-new-email-archiving-product/ We've just heard about Exchange@PAM, an email archiving product for Exchange from H&S Software. It integrates tightly with file and SharePoint archiving sister products. Exchange@PAM is not well known. Sales started in 2005, and it now has reasonable penetration as a tier-two player. It has about 1,200 customers. Thoughts:      It has, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/06/email-archiving-for-exchange-from-hs/ SIP is the widely deployed Internet standard Session Initiation Protocol (RFC 3621). XMPP is the Internet standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. There are substantial architectural similarities between services of these types, and advanced clients need presence, messaging, and session initiation capabilities. Integrating these services makes some sense, and two ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/05/sip-and-xmpp-convergence-or-coexistence/ We were recently briefed by Abaca, a vendor of spam control technology. Abaca sells an appliance, the Email Protection Gateway, which uses its proprietary ReceiverNet spam control algorithm. Abaca makes impressive claims for the accuracy and performance of ReceiverNet. The underlying algorithms have been explained to us under NDA, and they ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/03/abacas-spam-control-products/ Correy Stephenson writes about a persona in the e-discovery landscape called the "special master." The e-discovery special master has evolved as a role in the courts that can be assigned special tasks in a court case – whether advising on technology-related issues or overseeing all discovery. As anyone who attended LegalTech earlier ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/03/e-discovery-special-masters/ As soon as you try emailing files over 5 to 10MB, you run into problems. Eg, the receiving email system says the message is too large. Proginet has a new solution, CFI Attachment Manager, that sounds valuable. It strips off your attachments, and sends them out-of-email-band and reliably. Email recipients then ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/01/proginet-helps-email-very-large-files/ Microsoft announced the beta version of a hosted version of its messaging and collaboration suite. Microsoft Online Services is aimed at IT staff, unlike Microsoft Live Services, which are purchased by consumers. Highlights of Online Services:      Provides hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, LiveMeeting, anti-virus/anti-spam/anti-malware.      OCS and instant messaging/presence aren't ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/03/01/microsoft-offers-hosted-exchange-sharepoint-ocs-to-all/ A retention policy for electronically stored information is a definition of how long one will keep a certain type of information before it's destroyed. Eg, perhaps you keep tax records for 7 years, intellectual property material for 15 years. Or perhaps you keep everything for an indeterminate period. You can see ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/28/retention-policy-survey/ JINGLE is a protocol developed by Google and the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation) to support VoIP (Voice over IP) communication, and it is used in Google Talk. We are seeing increased implementation of JINGLE (Wikipedia lists 11 implementations, including Google Talk, and we are aware of more). XMPP is the Internet ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/28/jingle-implementation-growing-open-alternative-to-skype/ Iron Mountain and HP announced they will offer a hosted service specializing in the archiving and disaster recovery of digital images. "Digital Record Center for Medical Images" is aimed at hospitals. It won't be long until mainstream organizations make heavy use of images and video. As that happens, archiving systems will ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/26/archiving-of-images-iron-mountain-service/ The military and intelligence world has well-established procedures in which security labels (classifications) such as "unclassified," "restricted," "confidential," "secret," "top secret," etc., are assigned to both information objects such as physical and electronic documents and records, and to locations such as physical facilities, electronic systems, and their analogues (e.g., chat ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/26/security-labeling-and-clearances-to-go-mainstream/ Unified communications is growing in importance. As it does, a number of ancillary technologies will also become more important. One of these is speech-to-text translation. As phone systems and email systems converge, a key benefit is found in unified messaging – namely, bringing all "messages" (e.g., email, voicemail, fax) into a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/24/speech-to-text-and-unified-communications/ You can see email support headcount figures for a wide variety of organizations here--see comments further down this page. These are selections from the 136 responses we received to the survey below. The survey was conducted in March and April 2008, and is now closed. There is also a report detailing ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/20/survey-of-support-staff-size-for-exchange-and-notesdomino/ Keibi has a novel, and useful, tool that provides for the scanning and control of user-generated content on Web sites. This is obviously relevant to social networks like FaceBook, etc. It's also increasingly relevant to business Web sites seeking to have much more interaction with the outside world. The Keibi Moderation ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/18/control-over-web-site-user-generated-content/ IBM Lotus recently announced Lotus Foundations. The goal is to provide an extremely low-IT-overhead server in which Lotus applications can run, and thus increase sales to smaller organizations. Will this offering be a success? The argument against is simple: Lotus just doesn't sell much to smaller organizations. The great majority of seats ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/17/how-will-lotus-foundations-do/ I recently spent some time looking at the latest version, 3.7, of AXS-One's archiving/compliance software. The things I particularly liked are:      A rich set of case management tools for use by legal users. Archiving tools have been responding to the demands of e-discovery; they start with search and then gradually ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/14/attractive-aspects-of-axs-one-archiving/ We recently surveyed 70+ Exchange users, asking them what they are paying Microsoft for Exchange, and how many mailboxes they have. We then worked out the cost per mailbox per year. The actual question is below. The results seem too high for us. For example:      Organizations with 1 to 99 ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/13/what-people-pay-for-ms-exchange/ We were updated recently by IronPort, now part of Cisco:      Company says the merger with IronPort is going well.      PostX encryption is being added into the product line. (David Ferris note: I'm skeptical on how much value this will add to the product line.)      Company says most of its sales ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/12/ciscoironport-extends-to-web-security-data-leak-protection/ Dell will acquire MessageOne, which offers hosted email services--especially archiving, continuity/recovery, e-discovery, and compliance. We understand this will be announced tomorrow. We understand the deal is for $155M. We estimate MessageOne revenues at about $40M/year. We guess MessageOne has about $10M or so in cash. MessageOne has a number of important strengths. ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/12/dell-to-acquire-messageone-expect-announcement-tomorrow/ Iron Mountain Digital and Stratify are testing out subscription services for e-discovery. Pricing is still evolving. There are currently three tiers:      "XLR8". Search-only review without project management support or dedicated database.      Enhanced. Limited Concept Folders without dedicated project management or dedicated database. "Concept Folders" are a Stratify-specific concept, referring to ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/11/iron-mountain-testing-subscription-e-discovery/ Microsoft has introduced a new conference, INTERACT2008. It will be focused on Unified Communications, and runs April 8-10 in San Diego. Learn more here. Keynotes will be delivered by Terry Myerson and Gurdeep Singh Pall, who head up the Unified Communications teams at Microsoft. Fees are $795 if you register ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/08/new-microsoft-unified-communications-conference-%e2%80%93-interact2008/ If you missed this week's Ferris webinar on the state of electronic agreement confirmation and how it is evolving, listen to the replay at http://www.ferris.com/?p=318914. In the webinar, Ferris senior analyst David Ferris and RPost CEO Zafar Khan discuss: The benefits of electronic confirmation What legally constitutes an electronic signature The various ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/08/cutting-deals-faster-confirming-financial-transactions-by-email-2/ The SIEVE Internet standard specifies a language for processing email, typically used just prior to message delivery. SIEVE is usually provided in conjunction with an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) message store. The key benefit of a standard specification is that complex message processing can be handled in a server-independent ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/07/sieve-standards-updated/ Identical emails display differently, depending on your client software. And sometimes the way an email appears--for example, how it's indented, or the size of fonts--is important. To illustrate, consider this email. It looks like this when viewed in Apple .Mac, and this in Outlook 2007. The variation matters. For example, email archiving ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/06/emails-display-differently-depending-on-the-client-software/ Microsoft has been putting substantial resources into unified communications. This will presumably make for some substantial competition between Cisco and Microsoft, around the call center. Call centers are found in most large companies -- and many small ones -- and are vital to customer communications, help desk, client service, and telesales ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/05/microsoft-to-add-call-center-capability/ Microsoft's Jeff Raikes will retire effective September 2008. He will be replaced as president of Microsoft Business Division by Stephen Elop, former chief operating officer at Juniper Networks. Microsoft Business Division currently includes responsibility for Windows, Exchange, Online, Systems Center, Unified Communications, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and developer solutions. Jeff leaves big shoes ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/04/microsofts-jeff-raikes-to-retire/ Microsoft has just bid $45B for Yahoo. Our tentative thoughts, shooting from the hip, follow. Some of this will be wrong and this has not been mulled over. On the business synergism:      Yahoo has a culture that turns around helping end users' lives be better, and being end user-friendly      Microsoft has a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-bids-for-yahoo/ Ferris Research has completed the most comprehensive survey to date of business email systems, interviewing more than 900 companies around the world about their preferred vendor, upgrade patterns, plans for migration, and what they pay for their software. The report looks at small (1-99 employees), medium (100-999 employees), and large ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/31/erris-publishes-comprehensive-survey-of-business-email-systems/ A quite common type of spam message is now a very short message of the form: WordsJoinedUpLikeThis http://somedomain.com This sort of message is very difficult to detect using content analysis techniques. For the message to achieve its goal, the URL in the message needs to point somewhere reasonably stable, so that the intended ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/31/surbl-anti-spam-technique/ A recent Ferris report, The Central Role of Classification for Compliance and Content Control, described document classification. Security labels (see backgrounder [Security Labels here]) provide a mechanism for document and information classification. Security labels are often used in environments where document classification is mandatory, and access according to this classification will ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/30/security-labels-and-classification/ Use of security labels is standard practice for handling information in high-security environments. Documents are marked with a label, such as "Secret," and access to information is controlled by an equivalent security clearance. Security labels for online information generally use ESS (Enhanced Security Services for S/MIME - RFC 2634), which ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/29/security-labels-and-ess-backgrounder/ Editor's note: Before embarking on his currently footloose and fancy-free existence, Nick used to be CTO of Lotus. Lotusphere 2008, the big annual user and business partner conference/exhibition for Lotus software, was held in Orlando, January 20-24, 2008. Here are my main impressions. I've now had a chance to synthesize the flood ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/28/nick-shelnesss-main-impressions-from-lotusphere/ On January 18, Lotus announced it will acquire Network Integration Technologies. This will help Lotus produce a range of products that have low IT demands, increasing their attraction to small and medium sized businesses. Network Integration produces a very-low-overhead operating system, Nitix. This takes over the host machine, and either handles ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/28/lotus-acquires-network-integration/ Email archiving is a fast growing market, driven by the new FRCP amendments and the demand for improved email data management for eDiscovery, and Symantec's Enterprise Vault is the market leader. Recently, however, key members of the product team have been leaving: Nick Mehta, VP of Product Management, left in October 2007 ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/28/symantec-enterprise-vault-product-management-team-leaving/ XMPP is the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is the Internet standard for instant messaging, real-time messaging, and presence. On January 16, the sale of an XMPP client and server solution by Jabber.com to the U.S. Marine Corps for 280,000 users was announced. This large sale ties in with XMPP ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/24/us-military-using-xmpp/ David Ferris recently discovered there's more to life than computers, and at the same time achieved immortality. See music video of Puppini Sisters. He's the guy in the top hat and white scarf, about five seconds in, and at other crucial scenes in the unfolding drama. Shot at Greenwich Naval College, ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/23/shock-horror-ferris-achieves-immortality/ This week Flowfinity laid claim to being the first vendor to incorporate GPS data into a compliance workflow for mobile devices. See here. Flowfinity uses built-in GPS in BlackBerry Curve devices combined with Microsoft's MapPoint's GPS support to incorporate GPS-location with every mobile transaction. This is interesting from three perspectives. It's a ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/21/gps-location-data-used-for-compliance/ Sonian is a new hosted email archiving service. It's aimed at SMEs. Key design aspects are: Works with lots of internal email systems. Inexpensive -- $3/mailbox/month. No storage charges. This is important. Most other hosted services charge for storage, and it is a big unknown element -- the costs can easily get out ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/17/sonian-hosted-email-archiving-for-smes/ CrunchGear reports that AT&T, NBC, and Microsoft are in favor of ISP-level content filtering for copyright infractions. This would protect them, but do little for their customers. Content control in the hands of ISPs reeks of censorship, and brings to mind the outstanding 2007 Frontline report "Spying on the Home Front," ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/16/isp-level-content-controls-go-too-far/ Classic example of e-discovery: U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola has given the White House five days to tell him whether backup tapes from 2003 through 2005 include the missing emails associated with the Valerie Plame case. Who knows how many backup tapes. Probably hundreds, at least. Think about the work involved. Every ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/15/classic-e-discovery-case-at-white-house/ BlackBerries deliver the most widespread and well-proven mobile solution for business connectivity. Nevertheless, the world of archiving and compliance has only made limited inroads. We've just learned about Gwava's Retain for BlackBerry Enterprise Server. This new product sounds useful: Archives text messages/SMS, phone logs, and PIN traffic into a database.     Provides extensive reporting ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/14/gwavas-nice-archiving-for-blackberries/ According to this article, Autonomy recently won a $70 million deal for the Desktop Legal Hold product (formerly Zantaz). The author speculates that this was a Citigroup deal, and that the driver behind the deal was a lawsuit stemming from the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States. This is yet ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/13/big-bucks-in-e-discovery-market/ A year ago, vendors told us that Microsoft was making ActiveSync very inexpensive. The idea being to get Windows Mobile supported on very many devices, and working nicely with Outlook. The situation today seems to be that: The client software is very inexpensive. The server side is pricey. Standard pricing is a per-user ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/10/activesync-pricing-a-secret-sort-of/ When did voicemail first appear? You could argue it was in 1877. On November 29, 1877, Thomas Edison demonstrated his invention, a hand-cranked phonograph that recorded sound on grooved metal cylinders. Edison shouted verses of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into the machine, which played back his voice. Soon after, Edison invented ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/09/voicemail-invented-in-1877/ Microsoft offered $1.2B to acquire Fast Search & Transfer, a leading enterprise search vendor, and the offer is likely to be accepted. This represents a major move for Microsoft, as the scramble for enterprise search continues to heat up. E-discovery and compliance—along with day-to-day user productivity—are key drivers behind the need ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/08/microsoft-acquires-enterprise-search-vendor-fast-search-transfer/ To those in the storage industry, the phenomenal growth in iSCSI has come as no surprise. Because of its excellent performance, ease of management, and configuration flexibility, it's the storage interface of choice for many applications running on Windows Server. Take Microsoft Exchange Server as an example. For Exchange 5.5 and ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/04/exchange-server-and-iscsi-a-match-made-in-heaven/ On Dec 6, Seagate Technology announced an agreement to purchase MetaLINCS. MetaLINCS is the third company that Seagate has purchased in the archive, recovery, and e-discovery marketplace. The others are: EVault, an online backup and recovery provider ActionFront, a provider of recovery and migration services With the addition of the MetaLINCS e-discovery platform, Seagate ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/03/seagate-to-acquire-an-email-archiving-vendor/ Rumors continue to pop up from time to time about a possible HP acquisition of Mimosa Systems. What would an HP acquisition mean for Mimosa? As a company primarily focused on a hybrid archiving/disaster recovery solution -- and as a company that has historically been trying to build a beachhead in ... http://www.ferris.com/2008/01/01/mimosa-and-hp-sitting-in-a-tree-k-i-s-s-i-n-g/ I received a link today to an excellent Web site, which I wanted to share with everyone. It's arconi.com. Chuck Arconi is the author of this site, and inside you will find a wealth of useful information for managing Microsoft Exchange and other Windows applications. ... David Ferris http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/20/excellent-web-site-for-exchange-administrators/ IBM recently announced that its unified communications (IM, video, VoIP, etc.) product, Sametime, will have some important new middleware added in mid-to-late 2008, dubbed "Unified Telephony." Today's business phone systems are a mishmash of different PBX and VoIP systems. Many different technical interfaces are available. IBM's middleware will shield the differences between ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/19/ibm-sametime-gets-better-pbx-voip-transparency/ Something like 35 states require organizations that lose customer data to disclose the losses publicly. Attrition.org maintains an interesting list of those losses. Here are some recent entries:     HM Revenue & Customs (U.K.). 20 Nov 2007. Names, addresses, and National Insurance numbers of 25,000,000 lost in mail.     Ohio Masonic Home / Battelle & ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/17/interesting-compilation-of-data-leaks/ For a cute bit of Friday humor, here's Philipp Lenssen's spoof. ... David Ferris, with thanks to our friend Jeff Ubois http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/13/what-if-gmail-had-been-designed-by-microsoft/ Last week, storage manufacturer Seagate announced it will purchase e-discovery vendor MetaLINCS. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Nor are many financial details on MetaLINCS. Here are our thoughts: MetaLINCS has 50 employees. It is not yet profitable. We estimate annual revenues at $7 million to $10 million. The firm has established itself ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/11/terms-of-seagatemetalincs-transaction/ Last week, storage manufacturer Seagate announced it will purchase MetaLINCS. MetaLINCS makes e-discovery software that's used to digest and analyze a large corpus of email documents used in litigation. MetaLINCS will form part of Seagate Services, a new division that provides compliance, disaster recovery, and business continuity technology. This is in ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/10/seagate-acquires-e-discovery-vendor-metalincs/ Over the years the messaging arena has seen some major shifts. In the mid- to late-1990s we were very focused on migrations, coexistence, and malware. While these haven’t gone away, our focus in the early 2000s shifted toward managing burgeoning storage, and this has in recent years shifted toward compliance. ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/09/unified-communications-and-collaboration-better-together/ We're not doctors, but notwithstanding the precise medical definition of "addiction," it's clear that many email and BlackBerry users exhibit symptoms that are markedly similar to those of an addict. Examples include repeatedly checking for email when you should know you're not in wireless range, living in a constant state ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/04/information-addiction-is-a-real-problem/ Version 8 of Lotus Sametime, IBM's IM and presence package for in-house corporate use, started shipping on November 29. From now on, Sametime comes in two flavors. The basic version, Lotus Sametime Entry, is $20 per user (list price). It has a basic set of IM, chat, and presence services. Lotus Sametime ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/03/lotus-sametime-8-ships/ Microsoft has made available Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Exchange 2007. New features in this release include these highlights: Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) for high availability Support for Windows Server 2008 Support for IPv6 Exchange Management Console (EMC) support for POP3 and IMAP4 administration Public Folder support in Outlook Web Access (OWA) Web services access to ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/12/02/exchange-2007-sp1-now-available/ Back in July, Autonomy acquired Zantaz. As the last line of that article says, "There are no layoffs expected as part of the acquisition." However, layoffs have occurred -- in both the Pleasanton headquarters of Zantaz and the original Educom office in Ottawa. Other Zantaz employees have taken notice and there ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/29/zantaz-layoffs/ From time to time, management asks for a solution to measure email response times, along with per-end-user email traffic comparisons. In some cases, management wants to know how "responsive" the staff is to inquiries from customers or from the field. In other cases, companies want to measure productivity across work ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/27/overly-responsive-email-behavior/ A new solution for email archiving was announced earlier this month by Sunbelt Software at the annual Exchange Connections conference. The Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) claims robust features for email archiving at a fraction of the price of other leading solutions. SEA is an OEM product engineered by H&S Heilig and ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/21/new-email-archival-solution-announced-at-annual-exchange-connections-event/ RPost's Registered Email service is used to provide a high standard of evidence in civil and criminal litigation. The service can prove to a court that a particular message was delivered and often even that it was read. (See yesterday's bulletin for more.) The techniques used to discover evidence that the ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/20/additional-notes-about-evidence-of-email-delivery-and-disposition/ RPost's Registered Email service can be used to provide a high standard of evidence in civil and criminal litigation. The service proves to a court that a particular message was delivered and often even that it was read. It uses digital signatures to verify the content, time sent, and time ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/19/rposts-registered-email-provides-legally-admissible-evidence/ Rumors are already circulating about the next release of Exchange, code-named E14, due to release in 2009 or 2010. One of the most interesting rumors concerns email archiving and what Microsoft plans to offer for this critical market space. Microsoft currently supports email archiving by third-party solutions and provides MAPI, ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/15/rumors-regarding-the-next-release-of-exchange/ Bill Gates took the stage in San Francisco on October 17, 2007, to announce Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). OCS replaces Microsoft's Live Communications Server, adding important features for Internet telephony and videoconferencing. OCS represents a major launch for Microsoft and ushers in a new era of integrated communication. Using ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/14/office-communications-server-raises-risk-for-legal-discovery/ We've recently been researching Wikipedia, looking into the way its community works and discovering the good and bad aspects of "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Much has been written about Wikipedia: some positive, some negative, but little of it does more than scratch the surface of the collaborative ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/14/assessing-wikipedia-2-accuracy/ In the short term, it seems certain that spam will continue to get worse. There is a steady upward trend, and nothing to suggest this will change any time soon. However, spam control vendors will continue to provide reasonable protection against the onslaught. Spam is mainly dependent on botnets for delivery ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/13/how-can-we-end-the-spam-problem/ Symantec has a cluster of valuable products and technologies that encompass: Spam, virus, and malware control Personal firewalls, applying mainly IP-level controls Email archiving File backup Instant messaging filtering and control E-discovery analysis and review Content control; for example, to search for bank account numbers being accessed by unauthorized people Symantec wants to roll these up into a ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/10/symantecs-information-risk-management-is-too-fuzzy/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/09/symantec-acquires-vontu-726/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/07/exchange-labs-444/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/05/digital-signatures-client-or-server-side-912/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/11/01/iron-mountain-acquires-stratify-enhancing-e-discovery-services-633/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/31/microsoft-data-protection-manager-2007-382/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/29/our-gmail-experience-mostly-positive-part-2-392/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/26/our-gmail-experience-mostly-positive-397/ Google has added IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) access to its popular Gmail and Google Apps services. IMAP is the advanced Internet message access standard, contrasting with the more basic and widely used POP (Post Office Protocol). As an access protocol, IMAP makes it easy to use multiple clients, to handle ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/24/gmail-and-imap/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/24/archiving-digitally-signed-documents-302/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/23/vontu-to-be-acquired-625/ Bruce Schneier in the recent edition of Cryptogram gives a fascinating and scary insight on the Storm worm (aka Nuwar, Zhelatin, etc.). The key point is that Storm is much more than a nuisance -- it is also a mechanism to distribute botnet software to deliver spam and is written by ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/19/the-storm-worm-and-convergence-of-spam-and-malware/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/18/the-quest-for-true-email-sender-reputation-873/ We attended the EEMA Workshop on digital signatures last week, which had some interesting presentations and group discussion. Digital signatures based on X.509 PKI are used for a variety of purposes where the technology is directly integrated into the application. Examples are authentication for client/server and server/server protocols and directory signed ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/17/formats-for-digitally-signed-documents/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/16/the-emerging-market-for-active-archiving-962/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/15/pandion-a-recommended-xmpp-jabber-client-for-windows-187/ ISPs in many countries, including the United States, enjoy a legal status often known as "Common Carrier." Simply put, this absolves the ISP of responsibility if it assists in the transfer of illegal materials, such as copyrighted works or child pornography. The philosophy is that as long as the ISP ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/11/is-spam-blocking-at-odds-with-common-carrier-status/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/11/mini-outlook-inbox-vista-gadget-702/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/10/exchange-2007-managed-folder-assistant-requires-careful-planning-563/ XMPP (aka Jabber) is the Internet Standard eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol for instant messaging and presence. There is a bewildering number of clients available and little useful guidance or impartial reviews on choosing one. Psi is a good XMPP client that is cross platform (Linux, Mac, Windows). It provides features ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/08/psi-a-recommended-xmpp-client-for-technical-users/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/08/managing-email-archival-by-message-class-824/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/05/choosing-an-xmpp-jabber-im-client-657/ Microsoft will be launching its Unified Communications platform in San Francisco on October 16. To register, sign up at besreg.com/uclaunch, using RSVP code UCLTBL18. Expect to see a lot of hype around Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 product, which represents Microsoft's entry into the IP-PBX market. OCS 2007 leaves a ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/04/microsoft-unified-communications-launch-%e2%80%93-october-16-2007/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/10/03/be-warned-backup-tapes-do-not-serve-discovery-833/ EMC has purchased Berkeley Data Systems, the creators of Mozy, for $76 million. Mozy was one of several companies focused on hosted backup that started over the past 18 months. It has proved itself to be a fast and reliable service; the entry-level MozyHome service is free for 2GB of ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/28/emc-buys-mozy-for-76-million-109/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/28/log-shipping-for-exchange-301/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/27/the-e-discovery-hype-continues-783/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/27/what-is-e-discovery-143/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/26/orchestria-a-content-control-leader-978/ Open meeting laws, also known as "sunshine" laws, require that meetings held to discuss public business be open to the public. Exemptions exist in cases of security or privacy, and these are documented by each state. The purpose of sunshine laws is to allow the public to participate, or have ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/25/email-adds-confusion-to-sunshine-laws/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/25/spf-helps-to-improve-message-submission-authentication-823/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/24/public-access-to-government-records-includes-email-203/ CircleUp lets you broadcast questionnaires to a group of people. The results are then consolidated into a neat, manageable report--saving you the effort of having to compile many different responses. The questionnaires are distributed by email, IMs, or SMS. Other tranports are on the way. CircleUp started as a free consumer service. ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/22/circleup-broadcasts-queries-and-consolidates-responses/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/21/archive-search-enterprise-search-should-integrate-801/ The launch of the gorgeous iPhone seems to have stumbled -- in PR terms -- with a substantial price cut shortly after its introduction and horror stories of 300-page AT&T bills delivered in boxes. Nokia has responded with a "concept," which looks just like an iPhone, and announcements of new phones ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/20/mobile-phone-predictions-958/ Yahoo announced it will purchase Zimbra. Zimbra makes email and calendaring software, with access normally via an attractive Ajax-based Web client. Zimbra has tried to persuade business users to migrate from incumbent systems such as Exchange and Notes/Domino. However, it has failed in this goal. The company has, however, had more ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/19/yahoo-acquires-zimbra-513/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/18/apache-ds-a-new-take-on-ldap-148/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/14/sun-s-open-ds-directory-server-261/ We've recently been researching Wikipedia, looking into the way its community works and discovering the good and bad aspects of "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Much has been written about Wikipedia: some positive, some negative, but little of it does more than scratch the surface of the collaborative ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/12/assessing-wikipedia-1-introduction/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/11/ldapcon-report-on-the-first-international-ldap-conference-741/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/10/valuable-classification-technique-547/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/06/microsoft-to-acquire-parlano-675/ SurfControl, as its name suggests, became successful by providing tools that control what Web sites you can access. It has gradually been extending its control technology to other vectors. In mid-2006, for example, it acquired BlackSpider, a hosted (or "managed") service that filters email, IM, and Web traffic for viruses and ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/09/04/surfcontrol-s-email-filter-does-content-control-306/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/31/inadvertent-spamming-a-cautionary-tale-676/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/30/government-bodies-jump-on-email-archiving-839/ According to a recent news report, the University of Illinois recently apologized for sending an email message to all electrical engineering students, with an attached Excel spreadsheet containing "ethnicity, grade point average, local address, and other personal information" about students.This is yet another reminder of the need for outbound controls. ... http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/29/the-rising-importance-of-outbound-controls-786/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/28/the-technical-case-why-xmpp-is-better-than-sip-simple-for-instant-messaging-174/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/27/archiving-to-stub-or-not-to-stub/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/24/meet-the-spammers-7-lazy-pr-people-766/ http://www.ferris.com/2007/08/21/jangl-another-option-for-global-directory-423/