Email archive to integrate applications

Archive One works with Microsoft Exchange email systems

Email archive specialist C2C is to ship a major upgrade to its Archive One software in November that includes a new API to enable integration with third-party content management and compliance management systems.

Archive One works with Microsoft Exchange email systems but the new API also opens up the possibility of integrating other mail systems into its datastore. C2C's chief operating officer, Dave Hunt, said, "People think of email archiving as complex and special, but in a few years people will want email archiving to fit into their content management and compliance management systems."

Hunt said the new API would allow software developers to integrate their enterprise applications with the Archive One database. "It will enable automated management of the archiving process to be fired off by customer apps such as enterprise content management [ECM] or compliance systems. The value to the customer is that email archiving no longer needs to be a dominant system in their architecture - it can be integrated with ECM or their other daily systems-management and job scheduling systems."

Currently, end-users can search their archived data through their usual Microsoft Outlook email client. Archive One maintains links in the user's mailbox that seamlessly connect to the messages stored in the archive.

The new API will let ECM apps link into Archive One, for example, to perform a search or to change the archive policies such as the retention period. It could also be important for compliance management products. "Again it will enable Archive One to take a command from a compliance application - such as to delete something, change the retention period or perform a search," Hunt added.

Hunt argued that Archive One is more scalable than the Microsoft Exchange datastore and some other archiving systems.

"Some email archive vendors leave it up to end-users to send individual messages to the archive," he said. "Archive One can store all messages in the archive - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them per day. Our customers archive either for compliance, in which case they keep a copy of every email they handle, or for capacity reasons, to offload volume from a user's mailbox."

Archive One 4.2 will be released in the second week of November.