Evaluating GFI Archiver

This topic provides the fastest and easiest way to install and run your GFI Archiver trial, with scenarios to demonstrate how to solve specific business challenges.

While you may want to roll out GFI Archiver across your entire email infrastructure from the start of the trial, we recommend that you first become familiar with the product, its storage capacity requirements and hardware suitable for your email flow and email retention policies.

GFI Archiver is designed to be as non-invasive as possible and requires minimal changes to your existing email infrastructure; making it both easy to evaluate and easy to remove when you have completed your trial.

Follow the guidelines below to help ensure your trial is successful:

Recommendation	Description
Testing users	Start by rolling out GFI Archiver to a select number of users. GFI Archiver supports Active DirectoryA technology that provides a variety of network services, including LDAP-like directory services. so you can add entire groups as easily as individuals. GFI Archiver is completely transparent to users so there will be no business disruption. GFI Archiver uses email journaling to retrieve emails from Microsoft Exchange. This requires minimal changes to your environment and presents no risk to your email infrastructure.
Virtual machines	GFI Archiver works very well in a virtual machine environment with suitable resources. There is no need to install your GFI Archiver trial on the Microsoft SBS or Exchange server. Installing GFI Archiver in a virtual machine is a quick route to evaluating the product.
Know your mail flow	You will need to assign suitable hardware and storage resources to ensure that GFI Archiver can handle your company’s mail flow (the volume of emails you send and receive)

We recommend that you evaluate GFI Archiver in three phases:

Trial phase 1: Initial rollout

This step describes how to install and set-up GFI Archiver to start archiving.

Before installation, it is recommended to determine the average daily number of emails you plan to archive. This information is used to identify the required hardware and software you will need.

To install and set-up GFI Archiver:

1. Determine the hardware and software requirements and ensure that they are met. For more information refer to System requirements.
2. Install GFI Archiver. The installation can be carried out on the Microsoft Exchange itself, on a separate server or on a virtual machine. We recommend using a virtual machine for trial purposes. For more information refer to Installing GFI Archiver.
3. On install completion, launch the GFI Archiver administration web interface. For more information refer to Logging in to GFI Archiver.
4. When launching GFI Archiver the first time, run the post-install wizard to define:

Step	Description
License key	Enter the license key received via email when registering for trial. If you don't have a trial license key, register on http://go.gfi.com/?pageid=MAR_DownloadRegistrationForm
Archive database type	For evaluation purposes we suggest using the GFI Archiver Database option. This however will probably not be suitable when deploying GFI Archiver in a production environment. For more information refer to Configuring New Archive Store Settings via Post Install Wizard.
Archiving method	Choose how to get items to archive. For more information refer to Configuring Archiving Method.

5. When the post-install wizard is complete, review the GFI Archiver dashboard to see an overview of your setup. From here you can check the individual archive stores to confirm that email is actually being archived.

Trial phase 2: Configure & customize

GFI Archiver is now set up and archiving emails for your selected users. At this point you can start putting the user access rules and archiving policies in place to meet your needs.

Policy	Description
Access Control	User access to the archived mailboxes can be configured in line with your existing organizational setup. The Access Control page accessible from the Configuration tab lets you configure users or groups who have access to archived mailboxes. You can start by giving one user access to the mailbox of another user. This situation is common; assigning the mailbox of a former employee to another employee for instance. For more information refer to Define user Access Control.
Retention PoliciesA system that enables you to control for how long to keep specific emails in your archive stores.	Retention policies can be used to help control storage costs. They are also important tools to help your organization comply with data protection and data retention laws and regulations. Retention policies can be set based on a number of different criteria including message age, sender, recipient, message content and attachment type. GFI Archiver also offers what is known as ‘Legal Hold’ - this ensures that no emails are deleted for the duration of the hold in case any emails need to be retrieved. For more information refer to Retention Policies.
Deploying Outlook Connector	GFI Archiver gives users access to their archived emails via a web interface or from within Microsoft Outlook using the Outlook Connector, eliminating the dependency on PST files. During trial you can deploy the Outlook Connector to selected test users either manually, via Group Policy or via a third-party application deployment tool such as GFI LanGuard. When deployed, archived emails are visible in Outlook and appear just like another mailbox. Users can view, open, reply to and drag/drop archived emails just like a normal email. For more information refer to Outlook Connector.

Trial phase 3: Maximize the benefits to your business

When GFI Archiver is up and running, the next step is to use the information contained in the archive to help you better manage your business.

An integral component of GFI Archiver is the MailInsights reporting tool, which helps you identify potential security breaches, legal risks and productivity issues by extracting key data from your email archive.

For more information refer to GFI MailInsights®.