There is a wide range of indexing capabilities, and most people and
companies don't think about this until after they've gone out and
spent a lot of money on a solution. For us, "indexing" means that
each email is opened as it is moved to an archive, and the message
is read against a list of defined terms to create a searchable list
(an index) of terms that can be accessed later.
@27629 Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes do a pretty good job
of indexing the message bodies, but I don't think either product
actually indexes attachments. Most
email archiving solutions provide the
ability to enable a full index so that later on you can search
for specific emails without having to crawl through countless
messages looking for keywords. A master index enables almost
instantaneous searches across your entire email archive.
Why is this important? It's important for the employee because
we've found that employees do reuse old content and attachments,
and they spend a lot of time looking for those emails. Without
indexing, employee productivity would suffer as more time is wasted
looking through ever-larger archive
volumes. If you have a searchable master
index, far less time is spent searching for content. This is
even more important in legal situations. If corporate counsel is
presented with a discovery order asking for specific emails from
certain people with particular content, a master index allows
those emails (and only those emails) to be found and turned over
rapidly -- versus the time and expense of searching every
message in the archive.
Consider an email archiving solution that would at least give
you the choice of indexing the header information, the message
body, the attachment(s), or all of the above. You don't need to use
all of those options, but having them available is always
recommended.
Listen to the Email
archiving FAQ audiocast here.
Go back to the beginning of the
Email Archiving FAQ Guide.