Today I thought I would do a quick run through of the basic features of the administrative interface for Archive Manager from Quest Software.
Archive Manager is an email archiving platform which is quick to implement and generally once up and running requires minimal maintenance. Archive Manager is developed around standard Microsoft Technologies such as IIS and SQL Server so current Microsoft based support staff tend to have a very short learning curve for this product. I will look to cover architecture in a future article.
The main user and administrative interfaces for Archive Manager are all web based running on an IIS server so are typically accessed with Internet Explorer. The same URL is used to access the user and administrative portions of the web site. Archive Manager also integrates with Microsoft Office Outlook for user access but I will cover that later.
The above image shows the top of the user screen after accessing the Archive Manager web site. In the top right-hand corner the Administration button is visible. This button is only visible to users who have some form of administration right within Archive Manager.
After clicking on the Administration button the administration page loads and presents the different configuration options available. Only options that a user has rights to use are visible. As I am the system administrator all options are currently shown here.
Below I am going to step through some of these options.
The Logins option allows the administrator to view all of the logins that have been imported from the directory and which domain they belong to.
Opening the properties of a login allows the users security role to be set (within Archive Manager) and whether this account is allowed to login to Archive Manager via the Active Option. All new users are automatically made active by default.
The mailboxes option list information about the mailboxes retrieved from the email servers. The summary screen shows the mailbox name, it’s email server and when the folder was last update. The Last Updated time shows when the mailbox was last touched by the service responsible for extracting and stubbing emails from mailboxes.
In the mailbox properties there is an option to enable store management. This option in simple terms turns archiving on/off for this mailbox. There are also options to set specific policies for this mailbox which override those set at the server level.
The security roles option allows administrators to customize the default four roles (Administrator, Manager, Resource and User) that are installed with Archive Manager or to create new customized security roles to meet your specific needs. When accessing the Archive Manager interfaces only the features that are enabled by the security roles are visible to users. As can be seen by looking at the properties of the one of the roles, there are a large number of security options to choose from.
The mailbox servers option shows the mailbox servers which are visible to Archive Manager, in this case a single Exchange 2010 Server. The summary screen shows the server type, whether it is enabled for store management and on what schedule.
The server properties screen enables the administrators to turn store management on/off and to set processing policies for the server. For a mailbox to be processed by Archive Manager, store management needs to be enabled both on the server and on the mailbox. The policies set here at the server level can be overridden on a user by user basis, but generally server policies are used.
The final option I am going to look at in this article are the Message Policies which fall into two general categories. Export tells Archive Manager to copy email out of mailboxes based on policy, this can be done immediately the next time a mailbox is processed or after a number of days. Strip Policies convert messages within the mailbox into Stub objects with a link to the full message within the archive. The strip policies can either strip the full message or just attachments. The strip policies also have options to include or exclude un-read messages, flagged messages and whether to delete the stubs after a period of time.
I have only looked at the basic administration functions here but as you can see it is a very straight forward interface to use and simple to support. There are some installable tools to assist with administration for tasks such as retention policy management, PST Import and Search Exports.