Waterford Technologies’ latest version of its MailMeter product aims to tap into the growing market for regulatory compliance by including a facility to archive emails, even after they have been deleted from a user’s desktop.
The Irish company’s software, called MailMeter Archive, captures incoming, outgoing and internal company emails and stores them in a separate location from an organisation’s email server for whatever period is desired. Its intelligent indexing feature offers a search capability to find any information required, including domains sent to or from, file size, folder names, attachments and even body text.
When the base product in the range, MailMeter, was first introduced three years ago, it catered for email management, giving companies better control and understanding of how email was being used within their organisation. Changing market trends mean that Archive now addresses the need to maintain tight controls on IT and to demonstrate good corporate governance. “A lot of legislation is driving demand for electronic communications to be stored and retrievable,” pointed out Brendan Nolan, CEO of Waterford Technologies.
MailMeter is scalable: the largest customer is a US organisation with 40,000 email users. “We have plenty of customers in the 5-10,000 range; we can cope with that very comfortably,” said Nolan. “The key thing we’re trying to do is to try to deliver value from the archive. Data taken and stored has no real value; our forte has always been our reporting capability – taking the context and indexing it, making it searchable. A manager can say ‘Show me all correspondence relating to a particular subject’.”
On that point, MailMeter has proved useful on several occasions in resolving disputes. In one case, Mayo County Council settled a contract disagreement earlier this year using the software because it was able to prove that a disputed email had in fact been sent from a council officer to an external contractor. The council hadn’t bought the product for that purpose alone but it saved a potentially expensive trip to court.
MailMeter is constantly being upgraded; it currently supports two of the leading email platforms, Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, and much of the software engineering effort goes in keeping the product up to date with the latest version of both. In the future the company hopes to make the software compatible with other email platforms including Novell GroupWise and even other communications tools such as instant messaging.
By Gordon Smith
