Business practice shows that email is the essential communication medium for companies and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Entrepreneurs, managing directors, and IT decision-makers are increasingly faced with the challenge of systematically recording the flood of different data generated by email usage.
However, it's not just the efficient capture, archiving, and management of large amounts of data that are important. The legal framework also makes email archiving mandatory.
Emails relevant to business processes must be stored in accordance with statutory retention periods, which can be up to 10 years. Data protection is also a concern in email archiving.
These are just a few more reasons for Medienweite GmbH & Co. KG from Osnabrück to take a closer look at the market for email archiving software solutions. An interview with Dipl.-Ing. Ansgar Licher, Managing Director of LWsystems GmbH & Co. KG from Bad Iburg, is helpful in this regard.
With the Benno MailArchiv email archiving solution, the company has developed a solution that has been successfully used many times and meets the requirements for innovative and reliable archiving software.

Medienweite: Mr. Licher, you have brought a successful solution for legally compliant email archiving to the market with Benno MailArchiv a few years ago. As in most market segments, there are also various competing solutions here. What are the unique selling points that make Benno MailArchiv so unique?

Ansgar Licher: Benno MailArchiv is in many ways more than the conventional products for email archiving on the market. In the first step, we naturally do what all email archiving products do: we archive all desired emails securely and carefully. On the other hand, we offer the customer some unique added value potentials. Our goal is to make life easier for the customer with all his many emails day by day. Customers who use Benno MailArchiv work more efficiently and save a lot of time and money.

Medienweite: Can you give us an insight into the structure of Benno MailArchiv?

Ansgar Licher: Very gladly. At its core, our email archiving is based on three levels:
On the first level, Benno MailArchiv indexes and captures all email information, including the "invisible" ones as well as all attachments.
In the second step, the archived emails are stored centrally in one place. So to speak, thrown into one pot. That sounds unusual at first, but it offers a decisive advantage over other providers on the market.
On the third level, the access and authorization services are mapped. This means that the company decides which users are allowed to access their own or other users' emails to what extent. Here, email archiving and data protection meet.

Medienweite: So Benno MailArchiv is able to fully index all information including attachments of an email?

Ansgar Licher: Of course. The key is on the one hand how we archive emails, but also that we make every email in the archive easily searchable. Every email is full-text indexed directly during archiving, i.e. "on the fly". This means that we make every piece of information in the email searchable. We index the (mostly invisible) technical email headers, sender and recipient email addresses, the subject line and the email text, as well as all attachments to the emails. Specifically, we extract the texts from various Microsoft Office formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, etc. In addition, ZIP files are unpacked and the respective files in the ZIP file are indexed in turn.
This full-text indexing means that we can find every email, even if the searched text is, for example, only in a PDF file attached to the email.

Mediaweit: And after indexing …

Ansgar Licher: … the sophisticated archiving systematics of Benno MailArchiv comes fully into effect. It goes far beyond the possibilities of other mail archiving systems. First of all, Benno MailArchiv archives the e-mails independently of user accounts, i.e. the mailboxes of a mail or groupware server like Microsoft Exchange, Zarafa, Open-Xchange etc. That means: E-mails from Sabine Mustermann are not in an archive section that is only for Sabine Mustermann, but they are in the overall archive (of the respective client).
In other words: All mails of all users of a client come into Benno MailArchiv in a big pot.

Mediaweit: Why do you archive all e-mails in one pot? That sounds rather chaotic at first. What are the advantages?

Ansgar Licher: We archive everything in a big pot because that's the simplest way to make all emails or company information searchable. All emails are full-text indexed, including attachments, and can be searched quickly and easily. In addition, the further advantages of this concept are clear:

1) All emails to be archived are archived automatically. No one has to worry about archiving their emails.

2) It doesn't matter who the email was sent to within the company, and it's also irrelevant where the user has stored it in their email client: it's in the archive and can be found very quickly using the full-text index. In seconds, even with millions of emails.

3) Searching is no longer done through folder trees (in the mail client), but simply through the content information of the emails (search terms, full-text search, ...). This saves a lot of time compared to conventional methods, because the traditional search without Benno MailArchiv is either recursive (via the mail client's search function (e.g. Outlook)) or manual (because the user thinks they know where which email is located). Unfortunately, many mail folders are cluttered with hundreds of emails, so that you still have to search manually. All in all, a considerable time expenditure. With Benno MailArchiv, on the other hand, searching takes seconds!

4) The user does not have to spend time filing emails in a supposedly sensible folder structure. The daily sorting of emails into filing folders is an enormous time waster and can be dispensed with entirely.

5) Only the user themselves knows their own filing structure, other employees usually have a different filing logic. Ergo: Other colleagues usually can't find emails in foreign folder hierarchies.

The search technology used in Benno MailArchiv enables us, for example, to find and display any email in under 2 seconds in archives with, for example, 1.5 million emails. This performance is unmatched.

Medienweite: Your argumentation is comprehensible. In particular, the fast search impresses. How exactly do users who use Benno MailArchiv save time and resources?

Ansgar Licher: The key to the efficiency increase that we achieve with our customers is naturally not only in the fast search. Specifically, the user saves time twice with Benno MailArchiv: The first time when filing emails and the second time when searching.

Medienweite: Can you explain the efficiency of Benno MailArchiv using a concrete example?

Ansgar Licher: If we look at today's world of e-mail clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird & Co., we find that users store their emails in (over time) increasingly larger folder trees and manage them. For each topic or project, etc., folders are created and

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folders are created and every day the subjectively important emails are manually moved into the filing folders.
It can be easily seen that manual sorting and organizing emails results in significant unproductive efforts: Assuming that in a company only 25 users sort their emails into the filing folders daily, and this would only take 5 minutes per day per employee, this would already amount to almost 42 hours of unproductive work time per month at 20 working days!

Similarly high unproductive time expenditure is experienced when emails have to be searched manually. What typically, despite all search functions, requires a lot of manual search effort, is done in seconds with Benno MailArchiv.

Medienweite: And how do you regulate access to the emails - in other words: How do you ensure that everyone only sees what they are allowed to see?

Ansgar Licher: Of course, Benno MailArchiv has a sophisticated system for authorization management. It goes far beyond the capabilities of other email archiving systems. First of all, Benno MailArchiv archives emails independently of user accounts, i.e., the mailboxes of a mail or groupware server like Microsoft Exchange, Zarafa, Open-Xchange, etc. That means: Emails from Sabine Mustermann are not stored in an archive section that is only for Sabine Mustermann, but rather they are stored in the overall archive (of the respective client) - in the big pot.

Medienweite:And of course, not everyone should have access to all emails…

Ansgar Licher: ... that's right. Data protection already prohibits that. As a rule, not every user should be able to access all emails of the company (e.g. the clerk to the
emails of the management etc.). Therefore, we have of course built a user and authorization management in Benno MailArchiv.

Medienweite: Very nice. But how are the permissions controlled in Benno MailArchiv?

Ansgar Licher: As I said, we archive all company emails in a single large repository. This creates significant advantages over traditional email archiving solutions that archive emails separately by mailbox (i.e., User A's emails are stored in User A's archive mailbox):
Each user whose emails are archived has at least one email address in real life (e.g., sabine.mustermann@musterfirma.de). This is the key: Sabine can see all emails sent by or to her. She has a view of the archive just like her own mailbox.
This is where another unique feature of Benno MailArchiv comes into play: We can flexibly assign additional permissions to each user!
Suppose Sabine is the CEO's secretary. The CEO says, "I want Sabine to be able to see my mailbox. BUT: Sabine should not be able to see emails sent to or from the email address XYZ (e.g., our most important customer) under any circumstances.“
How would you implement such a requirement in Outlook/Exchange or other classic, mailbox-focused email and groupware systems? You can't.
Either Sabine can see the CEO's mailbox or not. Seeing specific content is not possible in mailbox-oriented systems. Thanks to the flexible permission assignment in Benno MailArchiv, we can say: "Sabine can see all emails from the CEO in addition to her own, except those related to the email address XYZ.“

Specifically: If Sabine can find all emails from or to "sabine.mustermann@musterfirma.de", then this is a filter on the email inventory in the archive. More precisely, it is a search query. And so the admin can assign further permitted queries to the user "Sabine Mustermann" at any time, so that Sabine can read all emails from the boss, except those from or to XYZ and in addition Sabine Mustermann could (for example) find all emails that meet the following criteria:
1) All emails from the domain "wichtigster-lieferant.de" AND
2) The subject line must contain "Auftragsbestätigung" AND
3) a file must be attached.
The list of these examples could be continued almost arbitrarily.

Permissions can thus be flexibly assigned to users. This naturally works both in the local (Benno mail archive's own) user database and in the central directory service ADS or LDAP.

Medienweite: Most users probably use Outlook for their daily work with e-mails. Is there an integration of Benno MailArchiv in Outlook or even in other systems?

Ansgar Licher: Currently, there is no ready-made Outlook plugin. But we can still score points here: Such a feature can be implemented comparatively easily because we provide a so-called REST programming interface (i.e., a REST API) for it. It is a so-called web service interface that works simply via http or https.
The API is designed to be very simple. There are exactly two essential operations that can be called from external programs (such as Outlook):
1) "Perform a search query" (which the user can enter in Outlook). The interface returns the hit list of found e-mails. This can be output or displayed in Outlook.
2) "Retrieve mail XY from the archive". When the user clicks on an e-mail in the hit list, it is displayed, i.e., retrieved from the archive. The interface transfers the desired e-mail to the calling program - and that's it! - it just needs to be displayed as an e-mail.
With the help of this API, the functionality of Benno MailArchiv can be integrated not only into Outlook but also into any (web) application, e.g., inventory management, CRM, intranet, etc.

Medienweite: Those are truly interesting properties! How does the development of Benno Mailarchiv continue?

Ansgar Licher: We are currently working at full speed on the completion of our new product generation: Benno MailArchiv 2.0. Several new features are being added. Particularly noteworthy are the complete multi-tenancy capability as well as the new, slimmer and faster Web-GUI for the user. We have now reached the BETA phase and will release Benno MailArchiv 2.0 in mid-2012.

Medienweite: How do you see the further market development for mail archiving?

Ansgar Licher: The prospects are very positive. In particular, we are experiencing strong demand from the Cloud Computing and Hosting sector. Many hosters and cloud providers are looking for a strong and scalable solution for hosted email archiving. LWsystems is optimally prepared for this need with the Benno MailArchiv Hosting Edition and offers not only a reliable solution for the Software as a Service business (SaaS), but a solution with a unique architecture and first-class unique selling points, some of which I have been able to show you.

Medienweite: Thank you for this informative conversation!

Medienweite:

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