Product Description

AbilitySuite^â for Email Content Management & Archiving (Release 5)

AbilitySuite^â for Email Content Management & Archiving (ECM&A) is a specialised email management software for organizations using IBM’s industry strength Lotus Notes/Domino email messaging platform. The software addresses email management requirements on three targeted, independently deployable levels:

1. Email archiving for compliance and corporate governance. A ‘Flight Recorder’ like feature set that captures a safe copy of every single inbound, outbound and internal email message and automatically archives it into the company-wide AbilitySuite^â MailStore™ archive. Duplicate messages are automatically reduced to a single copy to optimise storage usage.

2. Mailbox Management via ‘Rules Based Archiving’ to deliver the ‘Infinite Mailbox’ to users. Flexible rules allow for pro-active automatic archiving of email messages from user mail files to the AbilitySuite^â MailStore™ archive to significantly reduce the size of individual user mail files. Smaller mail files ensure improved performance of the Lotus Domino messaging servers. Emails are replaced with ‘stubs’ in the user’s mail file providing continued, direct access to archived messages. Archives are ‘rolled-over’ based on time or volume triggers leaving one open and active archive at any point in time. Closed archives are marked ‘read only’ and need only be backed up once as they no longer change. This reduces the time it takes to backup critical messaging data significantly.

3. Email Knowledge Management for the capture, categorisation and access classification of ‘high-value’ email messages as an organizational ‘Knowledge Base’. Unique meta data categorisation of selected messages that contain valuable content allows the organization to build a vast body of structured information from typically unstructured and distributed email messages. Security and access control at an individual message level means that the entire AbilitySuite^â MailStore™ archive can be made available to the entire user base through the fully integrated Central Search Portal™, ensuring that users will always only be able to retrieve what they are permitted to access.

Diagram 1: The three levels of email management functionality of AbilitySuite^â ECM&A

Innovation

The AbilitySuite^â  ECM&A solution is a fully integrated solution that provides unique and new functionality for organizations using Lotus Notes as their email messaging platform. AbilitySuite^â ECM&A is innovative in the way it integrates advanced email management capabilities to the Lotus Notes email client, which is licensed to over 120 million business users world-wide. In particular, the functionality available at level three for Email Knowledge Management is taking the well-established concept of separating index cards from the actual content as opposed to relying on the content being ‘scanned’ for keywords. The common approach is to simply ‘dump’ all messages into a third-party database and to rely on a search engine to ‘crawl’ and index the messages for searching. AbilitySuite^â ECM&A is unique in the way that it pro-actively offers users the option to categorise selected high-value email messages at key points in the lifecycle of an email (i.e. when composing, when sending or receiving) using meta data the organisation has approved and agreed upon. This approach is innovative as it recognises that an email about ‘Project X’ that does not contain the words ‘Project X’ will not be found by standard search engines. Not only does AbilitySuite^â supports not only context based searches (e.g. by project, by claim number, by production batch etc.) via its fully integrated Central Search Portal^TM , it also allows for standard full-text-searching, thereby providing the ‘best-of-both-worlds’ in terms of search and retrieval.

Further, AbilitySuite^â   ECM&A supports out-of-the-box integration with third party certified storage solutions such as IBM’s DR550, EMC’s Centera or NetApp’s SnapLock. These WORM (write once read many) storage devices ensure that any emails archived for long-term storage in non-tamperable format and are able to be taken off-line onto tape or external hard drives while remaining fully indexed and searchable.

Performance

Level two of AbilitySuite^â ECM&A is particularly aimed at improving the performance of Lotus Domino messaging servers as well as backup systems. Email files representing individual user mail accounts are growing exponentially given the fact that inboxes (and personal folders) are being used for long-term storage of messages, including hundreds, potentially thousands of attachments. It is no anomaly to find mail files that are in excess of 500MB or even 1GB. Email systems and indeed primary messaging servers were never designed for this and as such are suffering from the load this puts on both software and hardware.

AbilitySuite^â ECM&A automatically archives messages into the AbilitySuite^â MailStore™ archive and replaces these with ‘light-weight’ stubs in the user mail file. It is not uncommon for messages that originally ‘weighed’ in at 1 to 5 MB (1,000 to 5,000 kilobytes) to be represented by a 2 kilobyte stub. This process is fully controlled by the Notes systems administrator and significantly reduces the size of mail files and ensures Lotus Domino servers are performing at their best.

Backup software typically identifies which files to backup by changes to the date and time stamp of each file. For example, if a mail file contained 1,000 messages one day and 1,001 the next the entire mail file will be backed-up over and over again each day, rendering your backup system highly inefficient.

The AbilitySuite^â MailStore™ archive is designed to use a ‘rolling repository’ approach. The one active open archive repository, which is in place at any time is set to ‘roll-over’ automatically based on configurable trigger conditions. For example, volume based, e.g. when the active repository reaches 2GB, or time based, e.g. when the repository is 30 days old. At this point a new active open repository is created and the ‘old’ one is closed and set to ‘read-only’. This means that the date and time stamp of the archive file does no longer change and as such your backup software will only back this file up once and then exclude it from future updates.

This approach ensures optimal performance of both an organisation’s Lotus Domino messaging servers as well as their backup system.

Potential

The AbilitySuite^â for Email Content Management & Archiving software is written to run on IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform. Lotus Notes is being used by more than 120 million business users in organisations around the world. The platform has been around for over 14 years and is a solid and well-established technology context. In addition to being an industry strength email messaging system, Lotus Notes is a robust and scaleable web server, workflow engine, document management platform, instant messaging system and more! Lotus Notes supports all common open standards such as ODBC, ODMA, Web Services and offers developers an application development framework using Lotus Script or Java for the creation of applications that run within the Lotus Notes framework and draw on the advanced security and user management capabilities of this platform. AbilitySuite^â is such an application.

Email archiving is a topic that has been in the media for some time, with the first ‘big’ case hitting the news in the US in December 2003 when five major financial brokerages were fined US$8.25 million for not retaining and managing business emails properly. Today there are a myriad of rules and regulations that govern the correct management of email messages. More and more organisations are understanding that email messages are not ‘personal’ messages but instead company records, which depending on their content, need to be retained for years and years. They are also more recently appreciating the enormous value of the content of some of these messages. In 2005 Gartner reported that approximately 80% of a company’s intellectual property was recorded in hundreds and thousands of email messages.

While there is a recognition of the importance of email archiving, very few organisations have actually fully met their own or their governing body’s requirements when it comes to proper email management.

In January 2007, Ability Software exhibited at IBM’s annual Lotusphere2007 trade show in Orlando, Florida where the unique features of the software created a ‘buzz’ amoung delegates and IBMers alike. The potential for Ability Software’s product in the US, particularly the North East region, is significant. 

The Australian market continues to be a target market for Ability Software. Last year, following IBM’s ‘Lotusphere Comes To You’ event, where Ability Software exhibited in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, Ability Software generated 17 qualified leads of which 7 were converted into sales. Today, Australian AbilitySuite^â customers include organisations such as Australian Payment Clearing Association (APCA), State Transit Authority of New South Wales, Australian Financial Services and Connell Wagner.

Other information the judges should know

The following supporting documents (as pdf's) are provided in support of the above submission:

1. AbilitySuite^â ECM&A Whitepaper: “I know we need an email archiving solution, but which one?”

2. AbilitySuite^â ECM&A Whitepaper: Overview

(Note: These publications are the latest versions, which have been branded Overtone AbilitySuite^â specifically for use at Lotusphere2007 where we exhibited together with our US distributor.)