Update: Archiving Google Apps with Lightspeed, and Virtualization

It's been a while since I last posted...figured I owed it to people to give them an update of what's been going on.

First, archiving Google Apps email with Lightspeed TTC. This is by far the most popular subject that people who visit my site are searching for (according to Google Analytics). Of course, 'most popular' means all of three or so people who are interested in the subject. But there is enough interest out there that I'd better keep talking about it. After moving to Google Apps for Education, our initial goal was to use Postini for archiving email for the first year to make life easy for us, and then look into possibly moving to our own email archiving system in-house, which would be Lightspeed TTC email archiving. However, while this is a great idea (and still one we may consider) our plans and hopes were dampened by us actually having to USE Lightspeed's email archiving system to retrieve emails. Now, chances are we didn't do this right. And the lawyers requested EVERY SINGLE EMAIL that the person had sent or received in the past year. Wow. Yeah, so my boss and coworker literally spent at least a month going through and printing every email. Retrieving them from Lightspeed was a pain, from what I observed. Not only was it slow, it was clunky as well. I understand that the system was probably built for retrieving maybe one email at a time, and it sure would've helped if it had been on another server than the one that was also filtering our internet, but the time and frustration it took to do this was just unacceptable. Therefore, we are probably not going to move back to an in-house email archiving system, much less use Lightspeed's. Who knows, that may change. But the way things sit right now, my boss is so frustrated with email archiving and retrieval that the cost of Postini is well worth it for the ease of use. So, that's email archiving. Sorry to all you who were hoping to follow me on the road-less-travelled of email archiving with Lightspeed. I wish you luck.

My second order of business: virtualization. Wow, virtualization is cool. We (meaning I) successfully configured two Dell hosts with VMware vSphere, and setup several Windows 2008 servers to run DNS and AD to replace our aging Novell Netware 6.5 servers, which are now all sitting in our eWaste pile. Haven't quite configured AD yet, since school is starting Wednesday and we're running like crazy to get stuff done, but I'm excited about the flexibility and potential we now have. Being in the 21st century is pretty awesome.

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