Compliance IT Solutions LLC.

Archive 2-Anywhere

Message Stub Management and Rehydration

Copyright
© 2015 | Compliance IT Solutions LLC

One of the many benefits legacy archives provide is the ability to manage Exchange email box sizes by automatically moving an email message and/or attachment from the user’s Exchange mailbox to the archive. The archived email is then made accessible to the end-user by placing a pointer (or stub) in the user’s mailbox pointing at the archived email message/attachment in the legacy archive. With emails and their attachments making up the vast majority of data stored on the Exchange server, stubbing reduces the size of the email store which in turn produces a higher performance, more reliable email messaging system – all without end user compromises.

Over time this stubbing capability creates millions of pointers within Exchange pointing at messages in the legacy archive. Because the stubbing capability is made to be transparent to the end-user, they cannot tell which mailbox items are stubs and which ones are “whole” messages. This may not seem like a problem but when it comes time to migrate your legacy archive, this stubbing feature creates several problems for both IT and the end-user:

If the archive is migrated to any place other than the Exchange server containing the message stubs, those millions of stubs won’t work anymore and will end up generating error messages to the end-user - dramatically impacting end-user productivity, and creating a help desk nightmare.
Exchange does not have an easy way for Administrators to find and delete those orphaned message stubs so the possibility of orphaned message stubs will persist for long periods of time.
Message stubs can include additional metadata generated from their movement from folder to folder within Exchange. This additional metadata could be relevant in legal discovery so message stub metadata should not be arbitrarily deleted which could trigger charges of spoliation.
Systematically syncing individual message stubs with the archived messages in a forensically defensible process is extremely difficult and time consuming.

Archive 2-Anywhere is the only mail archive migration solution that can systematically find and reconcile stubs with the original archived messages, and remove leftover stubs from the Exchange server in a forensically defensible process.

Feature Highlights:

Date based Outlook message discovery, rehydration, deletion and redirection
Low impact on the Exchange Server CPU
Multiple threads allow unlimited mailboxes to be processed in parallel (Exchange Server and network performance need to be monitored)
Zero end user impact.  End-user Outlook clients can remain active while the rehydration process runs in real-time.
Outlook folder path is preserved in all cases.
Native Outlook search functionality is restored in real-time.
Powerful Reporting and Auditing provides the following:

StubFinder™

StubFinder enables you to query your Exchange servers to determine:

All original message dates are preserved (Creation Date Time is preserved)
All custom MAPI properties and other message changes (i.e. categorization) that occurred after stubbing are preserved
The legacy archive message custom MAPI properties are preserved for adhere to strict legal compliance
Orphaned stub determination with legally defensible audit report at stub message level

Stub Rehydration™

Stub Rehydration combines two related processes to systematically match and reconcile message stubs in Exchange with archived messages in the legacy archive.

The first process matches up each message stub (pointer) in Exchange with the original archived message in the legacy archive.
The second process includes the in-place restoration (or rehydrating) of the Exchange message stub with the actual “complete” archived message, thus producing forensically complete messages and original folder paths.



Strict Legal Compliance

The Stub Rehydration process does not simply delete the stub in Exchange and replace it with a “new message”. It actually recombines the stub with the body and any attachments of the archived email. This process achieves the following:

Original Exchange Message Id is preserved. This leads to:

No duplicate messages created on mobile devices such as Blackberry or Apple iPhone
Old Calendar and Tasks Reminders will not popup for the end user
Legal Discovery tools will not get “confused” so no re-syncing/indexing is necessary

All original message dates are preserved (Creation Date Time is preserved)
All custom MAPI properties and other message changes (i.e. categorization) that occurred after stubbing are preserved
The legacy archive message custom MAPI properties are preserved for adhere to strict legal compliance
Orphaned stub determination with legally defensible audit report at stub message level 

Stub RedirectionTM

Stub Redirection combines two related processes to systematically match message stubs in Exchange with archived messages in the legacy archive.

The first process matches up each message stub (pointer) in Outlook with the original archived message in the legacy archive.
The second process includes the extraction of the original message from the legacy archive and migration to:

PST file
Exchange On-premise Personal Archive
Office 365 Personal Archive
Gmail/Google Vault

In addition, the existing Outlook folder path is restored as well.

The original stub in Exchange is preserved until the process is complete and fully validated. Once validated, the original stub can be deleted using Archive 2-Anywhere StubDelete capability.

Strict Legal Compliance

Stub Redirection does not alter the existing Outlook message stub. The following compliance processes are followed:

All original message dates are preserved, Received/Sent date (Creation Date Time is not preserved)
Orphaned stubs are tagged and documented in a legally defensible audit report at the stub message level

StubDeleteTM

StubDelete allows an administrator to delete stubs based on date ranges within selected User mailboxes.