ID106 - Notes & Domino Archiving: Offerings and Roadmap

The need for archiving is currently driven by 4 factors:

1. Reduce storage size of mail
2. Legal compliance and eDiscovery
3. Collection of Enterprise Content from other systems
4. Line of Business application optimisation

IBM currently offer 3... well, 2 methods for archiving:

Domino server based archives, which will continue to be available but are being de-emphasised;
IBM's Common Store product, which is being retired; and
IBM Context Collector, which replaces CommonStore, Email Manager and Records Crawler into one unfied system.

There are also plenty of 3rd party products out there.

Mobing forward, they intend to push more on personal (user) e-mail archiving, and support for a platform agnostic Enterprise Content Management framework that any vendor can hook into.

For the user side, they recognise that the current archiving system in Notes is difficult to use, even more difficult to find and doesn't always work. They presented a "vision" for the future of user archiving. They call it a vision, but it was really a narrated story with some concept screenshots which were literally mocked up with pencil and paper.

In summary, they're moving to have roll-over nsf file archives for the user (rollover is date or size-based, and is automatic). Archived messages will leave a stub message in the main mail interface, and the message searching window will contain a checkbox to enable searching of archived mail. Whilst archiving will continue to have a scheduled process, the user will be notified if the schedule is missed due to the machine being powered off. The user will also be able to restore the message from archives easily from a link in the message stub.

Some of the features may be available in a point release for Domino 8.5.x, but most won't be around until "Domino 9 or beyond", they say.