What s New. Archive Attender 4 For Microsoft Exchange

Transcription

1 What s New Archive Attender 4 For Microsoft Exchange

2 Table of Contents Overview... 4 Product Architecture... 5 Archive Attender 4 Service Components... 5 Hub Service... 5 Exchange Service... 6 Archive Service... 6 Additional Components... 6 Database Details... 6 Communication... 7 Archive Storage... 7 Enhanced Outlook Integration... 7 For Current Customers... 7 Product Console Updates... 7 Improved Active Directory Integration... 8 User Groups have been replaced by Views... 9 End User Archive Search has been Redesigned... 9 Redesigned Delegated Search View Outlook Addin Component New Product Help For Additional Information Table of Figures Figure 1: The Archive Attender 4 console... 4 Figure 2: The Archive Attender 4 architecture block diagram... 5 Figure 3: Archive Attender 4 Console Navigation... 8 Figure 4: Active Directory Sync Setting... 8 Figure 5: Mailbox User Views... 9 Figure 6: New End User Archive Search Figure 7: Delegated Search View Figure 8: Seamless stub retrieval using the Outlook Addin Figure 9: Online Product Help Sherpa Software Page 2 of 12

3 Under the copyright laws, neither the documentation nor the software can be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium of machine-readable form, in whole or in part, without the written consent of Everest Software, except in the manner described in the software agreement. Copyright 2012 Everest Software L.P. d.b.a. Sherpa Software Partners All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. Archive Attender, Mail Attender and Attender Utilities are registered trademarks of Everest Software L.P. Microsoft, Exchange and Outlook are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Sherpa Software Page 3 of 12

4 Overview In Archive Attender version 4, Sherpa has introduced a new application architecture that has been designed to strengthen the stability and scalability of the product. In previous versions of Archive Attender all processing was managed by a single component, the Archive Attender for Exchange service. While this approach made the product easy to deploy, it also became a bottleneck as the number of users, amount of archived data and volume of retrieval requests grew. Archive Attender 4 solves this problem with an innovative new modular approach to the application architecture. The new console screen (Figure 1) provides a quick view to the services that are installed and the recent activity completed by each service. Figure 1: The Archive Attender 4 console Sherpa Software Page 4 of 12

5 Product Architecture The newly designed product architecture splits the management of various tasks into multiple service components ( Figure2) to alleviate the bottleneck created by a single service architecture. Figure 2: The Archive Attender 4 architecture block diagram Each of the Archive Attender 4 service components is described in the following section. Archive Attender 4 Service Components Hub Service This component serves as the central control point for the application and interacts with the product s administration console. In addition to handling database requests, the hub service access es Active Directory to retrieve user, group and other information when needed. The hub also communicates with the other services to initiate processes (such as archiving policies). There should be only one hub service present in an Archive Attender installation. Sherpa Software Page 5 of 12

6 Exchange Service This service is responsible for initiating and managing all activities related to the mail stores (Exchange mailboxes and network PS T files) including: Capturing messages to be archived Converting original messages in the mail stores, after they are archived, to the selected action (for example message stubs) Restoring messages from the archive to the mail store The Exchange Service will communicate directly with the database using the Archive Attender API to retrieve and update information and will use the communication library to transfer and request data to and from the appropriate Archive Service. To help distribute the processing load multiple instances of the Exchange service may be installed in an Archive Attender installation (as long as they reside on different servers). Archive Service This service is responsible for all activities dealing with the data stored in the archives. An instance of the Archive Service can manage one or more archive locations and each installation of Archive Attender will support multiple instances of the Archive Service. The responsibilities of the Archive Service are: Storing messages in the archive locations Building and periodically maintaining the map and search indexes Retrieving requested messages from the archives Performing searches of the archives and returning results Completing configured maintenance of the archived data Managing the hold of archived messages The Archive Service communicates with the Hub Service to retrieve all necessary configuration information from the database. Additionally, it will encompass two web services, which will be used by the other Archive Attender components to transmit and request information and messages to and from the archive locations managed by the Archive Service. One web service will be used exclusively to handle transmi ssion of tasks that need to be performed by the Archive Service; the second web service will be available exclusively to perform searches of and to retrieve messages from the archives maintained by the Archive Service. Additional Components Database Details All configuration data in Archive Attender 4 is stored in a central SQL database. In some cases, such as with policies, the current XML configuration documents can be stored in the database as a blob along with some properties as additional columns in th e database table. In other cases, all properties will to be stored in the database as individual columns. Components access the database directly using the Archive Attender API. Sherpa Software Page 6 of 12

7 Communication Communication between the services described above is handled through Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Each of the services will expose a web service that is used to facilitate the communication between the components. During installation you may have noticed that there are several references to URI addresses, the addresses are used to link the web services. The web services will all share a uniform framework but each will contain interfaces to meet the specific requirements of each of the service components. Archive Storage The storage mechanism for archived data is virtually unchanged in version 4 so no archive data conversion is required for existing customers. Messages will continue to be stored as compresse d.msg files accompanied by a metadata XML files. Moving forward the metadata XML will be named with the message GUID for uniqueness (instead of the current meta.xml naming convention), but this change will not impact archived created in previous versions of the product. Enhanced Outlook Integration For customers who wish to provide a more seamless end -user interface for Outlook, there is an optional Outlook Plugin available for Archive Attender 4. This component will communicate with the archives to s eamless display archived messages within the Outlook client without the need to click a message stub. For Current Customers This section describes product components that have been updates from the 3.5 version of Archive Attender. Product Console Updates Console navigation has been re-grouped to keep functions together All configuration tasks (i.e. licenses) now under Configuration link Search now contains console searches and delegated searches Some features have been re-named to be more intuitive Auto-aging policy is now a Stub Aging policy Dummy Users are now Legacy Users User Search Views are now Delegated Searches Sherpa Software Page 7 of 12

8 Improved Active Directory Integration Figure 3: Archive Attender 4 Console Navigation Synchronization with Active Directory has been improved in Archive Attender 4. When adding user s to the application it is now easy to designate that they should be kept in sync with their AD information. Figure 4: Active Directory Sync Setting Sherpa Software Page 8 of 12

9 User Groups have been replaced by Views Historically Archive Attender has required each user to be assigned to a particular group which was rather limiting. Groups have been replaced by views in Archive Attender 4 and a user may belong to many views simultaneously. Views offer a flexible way to manage large numbers of users and enforce policies Figure 5: Mailbox User Views End User Archive Search has been Redesigned The end user search view to archived messages has been completely redesigned. This view will now launch in a web browser (rather than an Outlook pane) and provides both folder and message level information on one concise screen. Users may search their ent ire archive, specific folders, preview a message or view a copy of the message from the archive location. Sherpa Software Page 9 of 12

10 Redesigned Delegated Search View Figure 6: New End User Archive Search Delegated searches (formerly user search views) have been updated to function like the user search. Individual members of the search view are clearly listed on the left making it easier for a manager to determine which user archive they are viewing (or searching). Owners may also see the folder list for each user archive this was not possible in previous versions. Outlook Addin Component Figure 7: Delegated Search View The Outlook Addin is a new optional component of the product. It works with Outlook 2007 or 2010 and offers use rs a more seamless view of their archived data. Stubbed message content is automatically retrieved from the archive and shown in the message preview pane. The Addin also offers unified search that extends the Outlook search to include both mailbox and arch ive content in the results. Sherpa Software Page 10 of 12

11 New Product Help Figure 8: Seamless stub retrieval using the Outlook Addin Archive Attender 4 introduces a new online help facility. Clicking the Help link (located at the top right hand side of the console page) will link to the online help document. Moving the product help to an online format allows the information to be updated in a much more timely fashion. Figure 9: Online Product Help Sherpa Software Page 11 of 12