The entrepreneurial practice shows that email is the essential communication medium für companies and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Entrepreneurs, Geschäftsführer and IT-Endscheider are verstärkt faced with the challenge of systematically capturing the flood of diverse data through email usage.
But not only the efficient capture, archiving and management of data volumes is of importance. The legal framework also makes email archiving mandatory.
Für business processes relevant E‑Mails müssen be retained according to legal deadlines. The retention period can be up to 10 years. The question of data protection also concerns email archiving.
Once again reasons for the Medienweite GmbH & Co. KG aus Osnabrück to take a closer look at the market of E‑Mail Archivierungssoftwarelösungen. Helpful in this is an interview with Dipl.-Ing. Ansgar Licher, Geschäftsführer of LWsystems GmbH & Co. KG from Bad Iburg.
With the E‑Mail Archivierungslösung Benno MailArchiv the company has developed a Lösung and deployed it many times successfully, which successfully meets the requirements for an innovative and zuverlässige archiving software.

MediaWide: Mr. Licher, you introduced Benno MailArchiv a few years ago as a successful solution for legally compliant mail archiving to the market. 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 respects more than the conventional products for mail archiving on the market. In the first step we naturally first do what all mail archiving products do: we archive all desired e‑mails securely and carefully. On the other hand we offer the customer some unique added‑value potentials. It is our goal to make the customer's life with all his many e‑mails day by day easier. Customers who use Benno MailArchiv work more efficiently and also save a lot of time and money.

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

Ansgar Licher: Certainly. At its core, our email archiving is based on three levels:
In the first level, Benno MailArchiv initially 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 a single pot. This may initially seem unusual, but it offers a decisive advantage over other providers on the market.
On the third level, the access and permission services are represented. This means that the company decides here which users are allowed to access, and to what extent, emails concerning themselves or other users. Here email archiving and data protection meet.

Medienweite: Benno MailArchiv is therefore able to fully index all information, including attachments, of an e‑mail?

Ansgar Licher: Obviously. The key lies partly in how we archive mails, but also in making every email in the archive easily searchable. Every email is indexed directly at archiving, i.e. “on the fly”, full-text indexed. That means we make every piece of information of the email searchable. We index the (mostly invisible) technical email headers, sender and recipient email addresses, the subject line and the mail text, as well as all attachments attached to the emails. Specifically we extract the text from various Microsoft Office formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.), OpenOffice, PDF, HTML, etc. Furthermore ZIP files are unpacked and the respective files of the ZIP file are indexed in turn.
This full-text indexing results in us being able to find any mail, even if the searched text, for example, is only in a PDF file attached to the mail.

Medienweite: And after the indexing …

Ansgar Licher: … kommt die ausgeklügelte Archivierungssystematik von Benno MailArchiv voll zur Geltung. Es geht weit über die Möglichkeiten anderer Mail-Archivierungssysteme hinaus. Zunächst einmal archiviert Benno MailArchiv die E-Mails unabhängig von Benutzerkonten, also bspw. den Mailboxen eines Mail- oder Groupware-Servers wie Microsoft Exchange, Zarafa, Open-Xchange usw. D.h.: E-Mails von Sabine Mustermann liegen nicht in einem Archivabschnitt, der nur für Sabine Mustermann da ist, sondern sie liegen im Gesamtarchiv (des jeweiligen Mandanten).
Anders gesagt: Alle Mails aller Anwender eines Mandanten kommen in Benno MailArchiv in einen großen Topf.

Medienweite: Why do you archive all e‑mails in a single pool? That sounds rather chaotic at first glance. What are the advantages?

Ansgar Licher: We archive everything in a large pool because this allows us to make all e‑mails and the company's information as easily searchable as possible. All e‑mails are, of course, incl. Attachements full‑text indexed and can therefore be searched quickly and easily. Moreover, the further advantages of this concept are obvious:

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 for the efficiency increase that we achieve with our customers lies, of course, not only in the fast search. Specifically, the user saves time twice with Benno MailArchiv: the first time when filing the e‑mails and the second time when searching.

Medienweite: Can you explain the efficiency of Benno MailArchiv with 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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dner created and every day the emails perceived as important are manually moved into the archive folders.
That significant unproductive effort arises when manually organizing and sorting emails, which can be easily illustrated: Suppose in a company only 25 users would daily file their emails into the archive, and this would represent only 5 minutes of effort per day per employee, then that would amount to almost 42 hours of unproductive work in a month of 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 ‗ that is: how do you ensure that everyone only sees what they are allowed to see?

Ansgar Licher: Naturally, Benno MailArchiv has a sophisticated system for permission management. It goes far beyond the capabilities of other mail archiving systems. First, Benno MailArchiv archives e‑mails independently of user accounts, for example the mailboxes of a mail or groupware server such as Microsoft Exchange, Zarafa, Open‑Xchange, etc. That is: 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 tenant) – in the large pool.

Medienweite:And of course not everyone should have access to all e‑mails …

Ansgar Licher: … right. This is already prohibited by data protection. Generally, not every user should be able to access all company emails (e.g., the clerk to the
mails of the management etc.). Therefore we have naturally a user and permission management built into Benno MailArchiv.
The administrator is free to use the user management included in Benno MailArchiv or to connect an existing corporate directory service (such as Microsoft Active Directory (ADS) or LDAP) for user and permission management. The admin therefore does not have to maintain an additional user database because of the new software. And the user gets a „Single Sign on“ based on “same user, same password”, so they can log into Windows with the same credentials as into Benno MailArchiv. Maintaining a separate Benno user database therefore becomes unnecessary (if the admin wishes).

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

Ansgar Licher: We archive, as mentioned, all e‑mails of the company in a large pot. Exactly that creates again great advantages over conventional mail‑archiving solutions that archive e‑mails separated by mailboxes (i.e., placing the user A’s mails in the archive in the archive mailbox of user A):
Each user whose mails are archived has in real life (at least) one e‑mail address (e.g.: sabine.mustermann@musterfirma.de). And that is the key: Sabine can see all mails that were sent by or to her. She therefore has a view of the archive as of her own mailbox.
And here comes another unique selling point of Benno MailArchiv: We can assign additional permissions to each user flexibly!
Suppose Sabine is the secretary of the boss. And the boss says: “I want Sabine to be allowed to see my mailbox. BUT: Sabine must not be allowed to see e‑mails that were sent to or from the e‑mail address XYZ (e.g., most important customer).”
How would you map such a requirement in Outlook / Exchange or other classic mailbox‑focused e‑mail and groupware systems? Right! Not at all.
Either Sabine can see the boss’s mailbox or not. Seeing only certain contents is not possible in mailbox‑oriented systems. Thanks to the flexible rights allocation in Benno MailArchiv we can say: “Sabine may see, besides her own mails, all mails from the boss, except the mails that involve the address XYZ.”

Specifically: If Sabine can find all emails from or to “sabine.mustermann@musterfirma.de” can, then this is a filter on the email inventory in the archive. More precisely: it is a search query. And thus the admin can assign additional permitted queries to the user “Sabine Mustermann” at any time, so that Sabine, for example, can read all emails from the boss, except those from or to XYZ and furthermore could Sabine Mustermann (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) It must have an attached file.
The list of these examples can be continued virtually indefinitely.

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.

MediaWide: Presumably most users use Outlook for their daily work with e‑mails. Is there an integration of Benno MailArchiv into Outlook or even into other systems?

Ansgar Licher: Currently there is no ready-made Outlook plugin. But nevertheless we can still score here: Such a feature can be implemented comparatively easily, because we provide with Benno MailArchiv a so-called REST programming interface (i.e.: a REST API) for it. It is a so-called web-service interface that works simply over http or https.
The API is kept virtually simple. There are exactly two essential operations that can be called from external programs (such as Outlook).
1) “Führe eine Suchanfrage durch” (the user can enter in Outlook). The interface returns the hit list of the found emails. This can be output or displayed in Outlook.
2) “Hole die Mail XY aus dem Archiv”. When the user clicks a mail in the hit list, it is displayed, i.e., retrieved from the archive. The interface übergibt the desired email to the calling program – and correct! – there it only needs to be rendered as an email.
With the help of this API the functionality of Benno MailArchiv can be integrated not only in Outlook but also in any arbitrary (Web-)application, e.g., ERP, CRM, intranet etc.

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

Ansgar Licher: We are currently working intensively on completing our new product generation: Benno MailArchiv 2.0. Here some new features are added. Especially noteworthy are the complete tenant 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‑year 2012.

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

Ansgar Licher: The outlook is very positive. In particular, we are experiencing strong demand from the Cloud Computing and Hosting sector. Many hosts and cloud providers are looking for a strong and scalable Lösung für hosted mail archiving. LWsystems, with the Benno MailArchiv Hosting Edition, is optimally prepared for this demand and offers not only a reliable verässliche Lösung für the Software as a Service business (SaaS), but a Lösung with a unique architecture and top‑class unique selling points, of which I can show you
a few I can demonstrate.

Medienweite: Thank you for this informative conversation!

Medienweite:

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