Nearpoint: Adapting When Microsoft Changes the Rules

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-10-15 14:04:18  One of the things that I love about publishing is the chance to be wrong and learn something new. Our industry and the technology that drives it is changing at an amazing pace. In the closing of my recent post about using Exchange Journaling for ongoing preservation, I mentioned the potential advantages of Nearpoint’s granular capture over Journaling as well as the monkey wrench Microsoft threw at them a couple years back. Indeed, Microsoft does not support parsing or extracting email from the Exchange database and transaction logs, except through a specific set of protocols. They phased out support for one of the generic protocols, ESE or Extensible Storage Engine API. This forced 3rd party vendors to either adapt or try to take full responsibility for their customer’s Exchange systems.This topic was on my mind because of a recent post by Karen Hunter of C2C Systems that compared MAPI and transaction log shipping for email archiving. That post insinuated that log shipping in general was no longer supported.  I should have double checked with the Nearpoint team to make sure that my information on their architecture was up to date. I was happy to hear that the Nearpoint team converted their archiving architecture to the supported VSS backup API. That preserves their granular capture value proposition and keeps their customer base in good graces with Microsoft’s support. Microsoft changed the rules of the game and the nimble adapt and overcome.