Improving the Compliance Archive Core

This week has been dedicated to improving the core mechanics behind our Exchange Defender Compliance Archive software and increasing the functionality it offers. This product was originally designed over two years ago, with limited functionality. This product has definitely been one of the more challenging software platforms to design and implement on a large scale. However, it’s been a very enjoyable program to design and launch. This week has been very productive and we have got a lot of new features and new tools to talk about!

· Misc. rending issues have been resolved.

· Elevated domain level access.

· Message download (.msg format).

· Import Tool ( Still being developed )

One of the biggest challenges when creating front-end GUI browser software is getting things to look and respond the same way across several browser platforms. It seems (chrome, Mozilla, opera, IE) all have their own recipe when it comes to rendering different component. One of the first issues we addressed this week was minor rending issues, increased performance and logic loops for displaying messages in the browser. None of these were huge issues, but an eye sore none the less.

We’ve had this request for a while and we finally implemented (Elevated Domain-Level Searching). This new feature allows domain admins to examine messages inside any user’s mailbox that is within the selected domain. Using this feature, you have full control inside of that mailbox just as if you were signed into that compliance mailbox. However, there is currently no way to wildcard search all mailboxes within the same domain at the same time. The processing load that would generate would be tremendous and would not be a pleasant searching experience.

One of the more elaborate features, (at least behind the scenes) is message downloading. In the past you could download messages in .eml format, which left a lot to be desired. Well, we’ve changed that this week. Now when you request a message download, it will generate the file in .msg format! Looking at this from a developer’s perspective and for anyone who has ever worked with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook controls will understand the heartache in this area of development. The control exposes a lot of information, if you just want to look at elements and examine a message contents. However, the second you want to use the component to perform any useful operations that’s when it becomes a challenge.

The last and most important area of concern was importing mailboxes into the compliance system. This is something we’ve been working on and it should be ready in a few weeks. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress with this tool and are very excited for its launch. When designing this tool, we’ve put message integrity at the top of the list. Some of the concerns we had about this software was handling duplicate messages and keeping them from being inserted into the archive mailbox. We also added the ability to handle program/internet crashes while messages are being imported and the ability to resume the import process.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com