Currently there is no archive feature in WebAcess
by: paul l. | over a year ago | WebAccess
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Votes
14
Add archive feature to WebAccess
by: paul l. | over a year ago | WebAccess
Comments
Good idea to have access to the archive via Webacc. Users, who have no access to the companies network (RDP, Citrix)from external for the moment don't have access to the archive.
With quotas the user must use the archive to keep older message.
Simple solution: Don't use archiving. It has no purpose in this century.
Massimo, ive seen a few posts on Archiving by yourself and to get rid of it...but surely not all your users have all live email on the live storage? It would be a massive amount of data
Yes, everywhere I have a say, GW archive is not or no longer used. There is plain and simple no use in it. The storage argument is wrong, cause archiving multiplies the necessary storage. Groupwise itself doesn't care about the amount of online Data, it basically scales endlessly. Last but not least, GW data in local archives is extremely vulberable to data loss. To make that absolutely clear again. There is no valid business case for using GW archives. That function should simply go away.It lost it's reason to exist when we stopped using direct mode to access GW.
Hi Massimo.
In our office archiving is necessary, we don't have a archiving system like Retain.
We know about the data loss risk. For the moment this method don't make problems in our network.
What do you mean "necessary"? If you need archiving by law, you need retain or similar third party solutions, as GW archiving doesn't do it legally.
If not, archiving isn't necessary.
Hi Massimo.
I mean "necessary", because for us its for the moment the only way to archive messages. The PO's server don't have unlimited storage. We have on all acounts quota.
Some of my users don't like to delete something (Der Mensch, Jäger und Sammler...).
Massimo..so you dont see any performance difference for a user with a archived setup over a non archived setup? no matter how big the users mailbox grows?
In my own archive I don't have performance problems (round 3,25GB)
Dirk - The client not sluggish on a search etc? and thats no archive all date in mailbox?
Of course, the non-archived client search is faster and complete.
There are no performance problems with online searches. If there are, the quickfinder index has problems, most likely cause it's not properly configured, but sometimes due to database problems, that however aren't size specific.
Groupwise *easily* deals with mailboxes of the biggest possible packrats around, 100GB for a single mailbox is no problem. My own mailbox is +30GB and rising (all mails since 1999), and everything I do is instant. Don't let anybody tell you that's a problem for GW, it's not. This isn't exchange.
Dirk: Well, if your Groupwise server(s) has not enough storage, it may be "necessary" for you to overall increase the size of your total groupwise data (because that is what archiving does, it massively increases the needed spae for all GW data, it just distributes it somewhere else). But that's like saying one needs 2TB local harddrives because the fileserver drives are too small. This isn't a technical "necessity".
Im from an exchange background and been looking after groupwise now for a month...im working my way through it but there has been no "tuning" on the PO since the install and putting that right has resolved alot of issus. im looking into the QuickFinder Indexing now so i guess il see if this fixes the issues for users who have issues searching larger mailboxes.
Searches in my mailbox are fast. For the moment there are round 500MB in the box (max. 1GB). The Quickfinder is installed on the server.
We virtualized the machine with the PO two months ago. So for the future its possible to increase the disk space. Actual we have ~100 users. We set quotas from 512MB up to 4GB. The largest archives have 30GB.
With smaller mailboxes the user have to delete mails, which are not needed any more. I know some users, who have several thousand mails in the Inbox.
For reading mails we are not only use the GW-client. Our CRM system also attached to mailserver using IMAP. Refreshing large folders is not really fast here.
What quotas are used on your systems normally?
GroupWise archive is most of the time "dead data" so we don't need fast storage here. The PO itself needs fast (expensive) storage for working so if we won't use the local archive and leave all messages in the live systems cost are higher. If we had enought money for this we would buy a separate archiving system. GroupWise local archives are the low cost method to calm down users who won't delete messages they never need again (as Dirk E. said "Der Mensch, Jäger und Sammler...").
In short, local archives are not the best option but they where used. So please extend WebAccess to get access to archives. The same thing is with archives and proxy access in the client.
Except you forget that Groupwise Archives are easily three to ten times as much data as if it would stay in the live system, so the argument the storage for that would be cheaper doesn't really hold. It may be cheaper, but in return you need much much more of it.
How do we know this Massimo? There seems to be a lack of tools to find this information out...such as how much are we saving using the single instance storage?
"GroupWise local archives are the low cost method to calm down users who won't delete messages they never need again (as Dirk E. said "Der Mensch, Jäger und Sammler...").
In short, local archives are not the best option but they where used. So please extend WebAccess to get access to archives"
But one can never be sure upfront the user never needs those messages again. I sure do get your point it's better then nothing at all, but want to add that if those files are local on a device this has a risk of loosing the data case a disk crashes. Then even if the archive is in like the users homedir then in both scenario's its imo a rather complex solution to provide access using WebAccess. As I think WebAccess can never have direct access itself, both from a webacc services as wel from the perspective that it's mostly in the DMZ anyway, it would always need access to the archive leveraging a POA service. So if that is the case, why would we at all still allow a user to archive using direct-access anyway, while at the same time the WebAcc needs the POA service for that to get access... as for such solution the POA code needs to be touched anyway, why not create a 'real' archiving service that mirrors for example the mail store functionality, but has a subset (or all) of the data in it. You could have the same space saving as in the primary mail store. This could involve a kind of archive-on-write and/or archive-on-demand concept imo where we at user/po/mta/system level can create archive-policies (which would more be like filters preventing messages to be replicated in the archive f.e.), but the archive store is just on other (could even be a bit cheaper) storage.
See my idea posted at https://www1.v1ideas.com/MFI/novell-gw/Idea/Detail/1349
I know this from personal experience of administrating and consulting Groupwise for over 20 years. Of course it depends on the layout of the local system (how many post offices for instance), and what is the dominant type of email your users deal with. If the vast majority is single-receipient internet email, then the amount to save is smaller than if the domaint data is internal mail going to multiple receipients.
And of course, then there are countless support questions "I archived/deleted such and such huge amounts of data, but I dodn't see my post office shrink by that amount, or don't see it shrink at all significantly.
All in all, the amount of saved storage space in groupwise by archiving or deleting is *extremely* overestimated by most admins.
Of course, this is all sort of off-topic. Sebastiaan has it explained very well why the idea really doesn't work. Archiving by design is a client based function often used with local storage, which, of course, webaccess would never be able to (securely) access. So to have webaccess access archives, first the whole archive design must be changed completely, it must be rewritten from scratch. And then it makes even less sense, as it would force the data to be stored centrally, like as if it was in the PO to start with.. Oh wait...
Everything you say makes sense Massimo i dont doubt that, my issue is that Archiving was put in pre my arrival here, so now its how to clean up the "mess" and the best way to go about it. They were not even using caching here so all the mailboxes where online - that is the first thing im trying to rectify, then pull the archives back into the mailboxes (is my overall plan) but im being told this will cause issues with the find function, but once cached the find is then done on the local PC not the server so i dont see an issue.
It would be easier if there was a better archiving solution built into the product as for some reason in peoples head "archiving" is what they need to do.
Fully agree on the overestimated savings, so by archiving 'locally' the amount of data to backup increased significantly.
For what I suggested as a possible solution its not the savings, albeit would save a lot of storage vs using user local archives, but the ability to
1) allow for an archive that is always online
2) that makes the user and archive data searchable in one pass using desktop/web/mobile solutions. Would be cool to have like a checkbox that shows archive and user mailbox merged. This would make a much more user friendly solution
3) if you would enable this: allow for a system level protection preventing users from deleting data from the archive.
Yes, I know Retain is there and I have customers using this. But, an in GW archive solution would help a lot of customers that do not want a Retain like solution.
There are many potential enhancements/ideas around archiving. Making Webaccess access the current solution however isn't going to fly and makes not much sense either I'm afraid.
For instance. There should be a central admin function to force "unarchive" everything. ;)
So only today i have a user 24.5GB mailbox, and an archive of 4GB - surely who ever created the archive would of been better leaving it in the mailbox? the user is online too not cached - Massimo what would you do in this situation?
What I always do when I encounter archives and have control over it. Unarchive everything.
I would say get Email archives out of your live system and personal archives are not a good solution b/c they're usually on local drives or on network drives where Webacc can't or shouldn't be able to access.
So Retain is the best solution I know, b/c it has a plug which plugs into the Webacc as a seperate plugin as a Retain-tab.
What do you need more ?
Now that Retain is with Micro Focus it would be very nice to have this better integrated in GW and WebAcc.