Microsoft Office 365 is an excellent business tool, we use it ourselves. Not a day goes by that we aren’t communicating with Teams, email, and creating documents in Word and Excel BUT we don’t think that Office 365 email archiving system is the best option available. We believe our MailMeter solution is superior, we have awards that agree with us. Here are 8 reasons to back up our belief;
1. Price and increasing costs
To provide eDiscovery, retention, compliance, and visibility O365 requires E3 with add-ons or E5 licenses for every user including shared, inactive, legacy, and ex-users.
MailMeter Cloud is a cost-effective add-on to your current O365 subscription and an alternative to the E3 and E5 plans no expensive compliance add-ons are required. MailMeter works with EVERY license, so you only pay for the license you need.
If compliance is important to your company you should seriously consider third-party email archiving solutions that work with your Office 365 environment.
2. Legacy email import and exporting emails in Office 365 email archiving
Migrating to Office 365 is not for the faint-hearted. The process of migrating legacy emails creates a period of limbo where users don’t know where to access their emails, it’s also a time-consuming process that requires additional tools and resources. There is a risk of data loss when migrating to Office 365. For the process to go smoothly it will require additional resources or Microsoft support adding expense to an already costly solution.
Using MailMeter with Office 365 provides a safety blanket it creates a copy of your data. This provides a fallback if something goes wrong, or the process is delayed. As users can access this copy during the migration process they have access to their historical mail. MailMeter improves Office 365 by giving you an archive that the entire company can search through. It also restores emails to a mailbox rather than creating untrustworthy .pst files.
3. Proactive vs reactive archiving
Best practice suggests that archiving policy decision-making should occur at a corporate level or by a dedicated administrator. Best practice also suggests that organizations should archive all incoming and outgoing emails. The decision on which emails to archive and which to delete should not end up in the hands of individual employees. This is for many reasons:
- an email gets deleted that should have been saved
- internal disputes
- someone covering their tracks
- an email deleted in error
- loss in productivity as users are wasting too much time making judgment calls on each email
When a user misplaces an email or deletes it, only to realize later realizing it was needed! Then they contact their Office 365 administrator to try and retrieve the email BUT it won’t be there because it was never archived in the first place. This approach defeats the purpose of archiving.
4. Running a search on Exchange Search
The search functionality on Office 365 email archive/Exchange Search has limitations. The most common concerns are the inability of Exchange to search for misspellings and proximity parameters. Third-party archiving solutions have the benefit of powerful and customizable search tools that allow quick access to archived information. They have search abilities that search through terabytes of data using Boolean, proximity, fuzzy, boosted, and regular expressions (REGEX) searches. You can then narrow your search and filter the search results, leaving you with a manageable amount of data. Searches can be saved, and previous searches can be re-executed.
MailMeter captures an absolute copy of all emails sent and receive. Journaling and Historical Capture helps ensure full message capture for compliance and eDiscovery purposes–even if an end-user deletes or alters a message in Office 365, the original, unaltered copy remains in the archive. All emails are single instances, digitally stamped and encrypted so you can prove the email has not been edited or tampered with.
5. In-place hold, litigation hold, and in-place discovery
Office 365 gives end users freedom to manage and manipulate their email and doesn’t offer much control over what they do. It does offer the functionality of in-place hold, litigation hold, and in-place eDiscovery for an organization’s regulatory compliance, however, the retention capabilities are considerably basic where users can apply tags to retain their own emails. Is this enough to ensure full compliance with regulatory bodies for your organization?
To ensure full compliance and prevent the premeditated or unintended deletion of important business data, such responsibilities should not be left to the end users
Having an unaltered archive is vital for successful eDiscovery and compliance audits. If end users can delete or modify email data, as they can in Office 365, it is unlikely that your organization will be able to prove compliance.
The information an organization chooses not to retain is as important as the information they choose to retain. MailMeter allows you to implement retention policies to meet regulations, by users, departments, keywords, phrases, and attachments to meet the various complex retention regulations in your sector and not just by a generic date. Keep what you need, which is a key article under GDPR and best practice data protection.
6. Easy to use and useful features
The interface of Office 365 email archive is overwhelming, even as an administrator the platform requires a serious amount of effort to use. Tasks that are simple in third-party email archiving solutions such as assigning roles to users and setting up user permissions are complex. Organizations need to search through millions of email and file data in seconds.
MailMeter uses an advanced search interface that provides extremely fast response times, enabling quick and easy responses to legal discovery requests. It can be used immediately by everyone, including end users, legal, governance, and IT departments to efficiently preserve, collect, search, and prove data management. There is no requirement for expensive training and additional resources to perform eDiscovery and litigation requests.
If you can use Google, you can use MailMeter
7. Single vendor dependency
Microsoft is so prevalent in businesses that most organizations often think must have it. Microsoft has long used vendor lock-in to grow and maintain its customer base. Once you have grown dependent on an application you are unlikely to switch to another program especially if it is going to be difficult to take your data with you.
Lock-in doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach, it can be broken down and various tools and strategies are out the to help mitigate it. The best way to start is to avoid having all your “eggs in one basket”. For example, with Microsoft, identify areas where a third-party solution could provide a higher quality yet less expensive alternative to certain bundle solutions.
An email archiving solution can be a key component when it comes to protecting and retaining business-critical emails in the long term.
MailMeter provides a separate repository for your eDiscovery outside of your email tenant. If your workforce works in a remote environment, this is particularly important.
8. Microsoft administrators and training
The costs involved in hiring external consultants in the event of an eDiscovery case can be significant. Office 365 email archiving can be cumbersome. eDiscovery requests can cost an organization $/€/£1000’s and can often require the need to hire outsourced firms or paralegals to do the searches. MailMeter includes access to our expert eDiscovery consultants for assistance with complex searches and providing best practices.
Office 365 eDiscovery and compliance require complex planning and implementation, with slow and sampled search results that are difficult to review, retrieve, and export. Sampled results mean you can’t see if the search is correct or contains huge amounts of non-relevant information, you only find out when you’ve completed your download which could take hours or days resulting in the need for a completely new search.
Why You Need MailMeter Cloud
No Hardware or software to maintain and manage
Unified eDiscovery and Compliance regardless of a mix of O365 or Google plans
Separate repository for your eDiscovery outside of your email tenant
Respond to Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR) promptly.
Retention Management to meet GDPR requirements.
Scalable – resourced to meet your organization’s individual needs
Cost-effective – no need to upgrade to E3, E5
Data Sovereignty – region closest to your organization
Easy setup. Be up and running in one day!
Trusted by many brands across multiple industries, our MailMeter solution works seamlessly with Office 365 and Exchange. Our experts are ready to talk to you one on one to suggest archival best practices, to help you manage email storage and discovery better, learn how to make use of all the archived business email for business intelligence and stay ready for regulation compliance.
