5.0 Getting Started with Retain Archiving

First, Plan Your Retain Archiving System

As a best practice, we recommend that you start by creating a written plan. Obviously, this plan will evolve and expand over time, but beginning with a plan is the most effective and efficient way to ensure a successful Retain deployment.

Do the following:

  1. Identify stakeholders in your organization who have a vested interest in a successful Retain deployment.

  2. With the stakeholders, decide on a convenient and accessible way to propose, review, and finalize your Retain deployment plan.

  3. Create your plan by doing at least the following:

    1. Identify the messaging systems that Retain will service.

    2. Record each system’s DNS and IP address information, physical location, administrator information, and any other information relative to the system’s future interaction with Retain.

    3. Save a space to record details identified during the deployment, such as system credentials, licenses, and other information that Retain and third-party systems will require as you connect them together.

    4. Determine the times when systems and network traffic are slow and best suited for archiving operations to take place. This will feed into schedule creation as proposed in Creating Your Schedules.

    5. Articulate the scope of what needs to be archived for each system: users, groups, message types, date ranges, attachments, and so on.

    6. Avoid redundant data collection.

Next, Match Your Messaging Systems to Retain’s Archiving methods

Retain’s archiving methods are designed to match the messaging systems being archived.

Find your messaging platforms in Figure 5-1 to determine which of Retain’s archiving models your organization requires.

Figure 5-1 Retain’s Archiving Models Match Platform Needs

Retain-initiated

Job-based

Messaging-system-initiated

REST-based

  • Traditional email systems store messages (at least temporarily) in a message store.

  • Retain lets you create jobs that run according to schedules you set and retrieve or dredge message content that matches your specified parameters.

  • Retain provides practically unlimited retrieval flexibility through the use of modules, schedules, profiles, workers, and jobs that you create and tune to match your organization’s archiving needs.

  • More recent approaches to messaging and social media platforms function in real time. Users exchange voicemail, text messages, and other communications that aren’t stored in a traditional message store, let alone organized for auditing and archival purposes.

  • Retain lets you work with third-party and /or inhouse providers to capture and archive these messages and other content in realtime by allowing messaging providers to archive directly to your Retain server by using REST-based APIs .

  • You must obtain one or more additional licenses in order to create and submit the information that the third-party providers require to connect with Retain.

Where to Go from Here