1.0 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 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 1-1 to determine which of Retain’s archiving models your organization requires.

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

Retain Pulls Data to Its Message Store

Messaging System Pushes to Retain’s Message Store

  • Traditional email systems store messages in their message stores.

  • You create jobs that run according to schedules you set and pull content that matches your profile-specified parameters from those message stores.

  • Retain provides practically unlimited search and retrieval capabilities for administrators and users with sufficient archive-access privileges.

IMPORTANT:These messaging systems require one or more additional licenses to connect with Retain.

  • More recent messaging providers let users communicate in real time as they exchange voicemail, text messages, and so on.

  • These providers don’t offer a centralized message store. At best, data is temporarily kept in device-based storage.

  • Retain works with these providers so that as message data is generated, it is also archived by Retain.

  • Retain automatically organizes archived message data for search and retrieval.

  • As the graphic shows, for three of the systems, profiles let you control what is archived.

Where to Go from Here