Sonavault Email Archival System

We did a quick preview of Sonavault, a product meant to archive emails and public folders from an Exchange Server, even after they've been deleted. The product integrates with the Active Directory, which allows its functionality to be completely role-based. Its has pre-defined roles for admins, auditors, and users. Plus new roles can be defined.

The good thing about Sonavault is that every action in the software is audited, be it a change in policies, tampering with the data, or even if somebody is acting suspicious and searching through emails unnecessarily.

The software also allows searching mails by subject, sender, date and saving it in various formats and exporting it in case of a litigation. Moreover, emails can also be locked, so that no other policy would apply to it. How you retain email in Sonavault depends upon your legal requirements and govt. policies. You can retain mails by sender or user name, and even by a specific number of days.

Message Stubbing

Another good feature of Sonavault is message stubbing. This facility removes the body and attachment from messages thereby reducing storage size on the Exchange Server. This let's you define what to stub and by when. So if you want to stub only attachments or the body text from the mail server for all messages that are say, 365 days older, then you can do that and the whole process will be transparent to the user. In fact, you can define stub policies for specific users and groups. For instance, there would be certain users in your company whose mailboxes are very large, so you can decide to stub their mailboxes after say, every 30 days.

Role management

You can define who can access which mailboxes. There's a query builder in SonaVault, which lets you search for specific mails by expiry date, words (credit card number, objectionable content, etc), keywords, near search, and even boolean search (AND, OR).

Other things include review management system, wherein a user can view mails, escalate them, put comments, etc. You can even give access to external people like lawyers who're not a part of your network.

Case Management

A key use of an email archival system is for pulling out email when there's a litigation. So a company could have multiple cases running against it. In that case, the emails pertaining to individual cases can be assigned to specific people and be locked. This way, these emails will not expire.

Bottomline: Overall, the product provides all the features necessary to safely and securely archive all your emails, thereby helping your organization meet regulatory norms and keep your Exchange Server less loaded.