David Berlind posted an excellent article on his ZDNet blog about Google’s $50/yr all-in-one communications and collaboration platform, and how estimating costs for running your own messaging server is hard to determine. It’s definitely an exercise in “fuzzy math.”

Does payback on email alone make Google Apps’ $50/yr. worth it? (Docs, etc? That’s icing) by ZDNet‘s David Berlind — Whenever I talk about doing something crazy like using Google Apps instead of other office suites, a conversation that’s usually driven by my beliefs about computing in the cloud, there are some number of ZDNet readers that chalk it off to insanity or a momentary lapse of reason. Or, maybe I forgot to take [...]

Sonian is proving that operating your own archive in your own data center is more expensive and distracting than using a best of breed hosted provider. That’s because we can offer low (less than $5) fixed pricing per user per month with unlimited storage.

Our data center partners, software design and distributed architecture provides the reliability and security you desire for all your digital assets. Sometimes the Do it Yourself approach is best, but in the archiving case, where storage management and personnel costs are always rising, we can do a better job for you for less cost that you can with a “Do it Yourself” approach.

Byte and Switch posted an informative article The Biggest Email Archiving Errors that offers some practical advice on email archive issues.

The number one issue discussed is “Storing too much information”

A frequent problem involves the storage of what some sources call “bacn,” or email that’s not personal but isn’t spam, either. Examples include newsletters, advertisements from companies with relationships to the sendee, various HR emails, and so forth.

The answer to bacn may be the same as the answer to spam, which is filtering. Several service providers claim to offer solutions, including Zantaz (now Autonomy), Fortiva, and MessageGate. According to MessageGate, 10 percent to 30 percent of email is bacn that winds up clogging the inbox and negatively impacting search results.

Filtering is a wonderful idea, if only the technology was mature enough to guarantee that a critical email that should be archived does in fact get saved. There are too many conditions where a “smart” filter can’t decide conclusively whether an email is “bacn” or not, and the resulting queues that require too much human oversight add an additional burden to IT departments that already have too many projects to manage.

Sonian believes effective email archiving shouldn’t be difficult or expensive. Our goal is to provide a cost-effective, secure, reliable hosted platform to archive every message for as long as required. Our infinite archive storage system is designed from the ground-up to operate with this philosophy. We provide easy to use search capabilities that work fast regardless of how many messages are stored. And our pricing includes unlimited storage.

Archiving requires a defensive position mindset. When you’re playing defense, as is the case when you are the IT department dealing with auditors and the legal profession, you can’t afford to slip up even once. Archive everything, and use smart search technology to find exactly what you need.

Sonian uses smart filtering technology to streamline search results rather than keeping an important email from being archived at all.