Archiving vast amounts of email from Microsoft Exchange seems like a great idea. Organisations can constrain the size of their employees mailboxes and still have a record of all communications. They can search this huge repository to recover data when required and in addition are meeting their compliance requirements by effectively ‘keeping everything for ever’ (or for a defined period of time). However, there are a number of reasons why traditional email archiving is not that effective and why using a solution like Knowledgemill is a lot better.
The main problem is that all of this archived data is unstructured. This means that attempting to find specific information relating to a particular client or a project can require a lengthy fishing expedition using search tools. Imagine that you are looking for all communications relating to a single client but over the last 5 years 25 people in your organisation have interacted with that client. That would require searching across 25 users archived mailboxes, assuming that they had filed the information in the first place, in the right place and in the right format originally. Each person working with that client may have called the client by a different name and filed information in a different way, if at all. This process often involves a request to the IT team and can take a long time with many false positive results and can return a huge amount of irrelevant data to sift through.
KnowledegeMill essentially archives all this data into relevant folders by client or project when the users send and receive. All emails and documents are stored side by side. You access them yourself through your usual outlook interface. Nothing is missing as automatic filing ensures that every email has to be filed and it is in the right place, in standard format and can be retrieved in a split second.