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Responding to numerous requests from its customers, Intradyn, of St. Paul, Minn., has re-architected its all-in-one e-mail archiving appliance to include a simpler user interface, more search capabilities and the ability to save searches.
The new version, dubbed ComplianceVault06, includes all of those functions while capturing all of a companys e-mail on a continuous basis, from an unlimited number of mail boxes.
“During the past 18 months, weve talked to hundreds of compliance officers and they have asked for additional features and capabilities,” said Intradyn CEO Gary Doan. “Weve even had some of our customers go through audits and as a result of having gone through that process, they came up with ideas that would have made [the process] easier.”
During these extensive feedback sessions, Intradyn executives also learned, somewhat surprisingly, that many of its ComplianceVault customers were not the small brokers and dealers the company had originally had in mind when architecting the original product.
“We found that more than 50 percent of our customers werent brokers or dealers at all and didnt necessarily have the same regulation set that brokers and dealers have. So instead of using it for compliance, they were using it for e-mail archiving, just as a good business practice,” Doan said.
The most asked-for change for ComplianceVault06, which is built on a completely new architecture from the original product, was expanded search and retrieval capabilities. The new version has added wildcard searches, fuzzy searches, proximity searches, range searches, boosting relevance levels, grouping for sub-queries, field grouping and the ability to save searches.
“If they want to run a particular search once a week for the last seven days worth of e-mail, they can save that search and have it execute automatically, or if they want to look at a random sampling of their e-mail based on certain keywords, they can also do that,” Doan said.
Expanding search and retrieval of specific content is something Intradyn clearly needed to improve upon, making these new features particularly welcome, said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, of Milford, Mass.
“People dont search and retrieve out of archives that often, but because of the litigious risk associated with saving e-mails for an extensive period of time, that may require a search and retrieval based on discovery notice,” he said. “You need to be able to search based on the requirements outlined in the discovery notification and then export them for further review, culling and evidence preparation by external counsel.”
ComplianceVault06, which starts at under $10,000, also offers more audit features, including the ability for compliance officers to perform random samples of e-mail based on several criteria, or to search the audit log database.
“The more extensive audit capabilities you have, the easier it is to find what youre looking for, but it also supports many regulation requirements that require you to have an audit trail of who tried to access specific messages or what actions they tried to take,” Babineau said. “So the bigger and better audit trail you can build, the better you can support the regulators and knock off a few litigation support requirements on the chain of custody side.”
ComplianceVault06 also contains many other new features, including a simpler user interface, the ability to export e-mail search results to a variety of formats, multiple mail server support, the ability to write to tape on demand, both individual and group user account privileges, new archive scheduling features and improved tape cataloging.
Although there are many other e-mail archiving solutions on the market, none has both the price point and a combination of hardware and software in one appliance, Babineau said.
“Its all in one, so you get the software and the non-erasable, rewritable storage in one appliance as opposed to having to buy the products and storage from separate vendors,” he said.
Intradyns next generation of e-mail archiving, Doan said, will be a multi-terabyte appliance that can handle a larger capacity on disk.
“Most of whats happening with this device is really happening on disk because when they do searches and discovery, they are doing it on disk,” he said.