For businesses using Microsoft Office 365, an email archiving solution can be a key component when it comes to protecting and retaining business-critical emails in the long term. But a decision as to which solution is best suited to the needs of a company is often not an easy one to take. There are various archiving options already available in Microsoft Office 365, such as:

• Exchange Online Archiving (EOA)
• In-Place Archiving
• AutoArchive (also known as “archive to .PST”), and
• the “Archive” button in Microsoft Outlook

However, there are also various shortcomings involving the above mentioned archiving options, in contrast to integrating with a third-party archiving tool:

1. Taking Responsibility for Your own Data: Responsibility for protecting and preserving data lies with the customer, not Microsoft (“shared responsibility model”).
2. Risk of Data Loss
   Even if Microsoft Office 365 is fundamentally capable of restoring accidentally deleted data, situations can arise that impede or even seriously jeopardize daily business operations.
3. Self-Service for End Users
   Without a third-party email archiving solution, end-users would be unable to search through their own data quickly and efficiently and restore emails, thus putting the strain on IT staff.
4. Independence from Microsoft
   Without a third-party email archiving solution, users would be unable to access their own emails if the Microsoft Office 365 service were to fail or even if you will stop using it.

Why Mail Store and Office 365 together
make sense

MailStore is a software solution that can seamlessly integrate with Office 365 and can help businesses overcome the above shortcomings while offering many more benefits to the end-user as following:

1. Legal and Economic Benefits:
   • Adhere to a growing number of compliance and GDPR requirements.
   • Reduce strain on IT departments and their budgets by mitigating overloaded servers, increasing storage costs, and complex backup and restore processes.
   • Reduce reliance on the provider and store emails locally under the company’s control, ensuring availability regardless of the provider’s state.
2. Data Loss Protection:
   • Ensure archiving of existing or incoming emails, as soon as they are received or sent by setting up the configuration for journal archiving.
   • Reduce the impact of cumbersome and sensitive PST files on storage and backup resources.
   • Prevent malicious or accidental email deletion, even when employees leave a company.
3. Lower Storage Requirements:
   • Maintain the workload of the server at low level by deleting emails once they have been archived.
   • Eliminates the need to use mailbox quotas as a way to limit the use of a mail server’s storage capacity.
4. Backup and Restore:
   • One-click email restoration, without subjecting the administration to the time-consuming process of recovery.
   • Reduce disruption to daily operations and ensure access to all emails via the email archive, even when the mail server is out of service.
5. Productivity Benefits:
   • Fast full-text searching for emails and all types of file attachments.
   • Convenient add-in for Microsoft Outlook with seamless integration.
   • Access emails conveniently via any web browser (desktop or mobile) or the MailStore Client app.

In addition to offering both MailStore and various Microsoft Office 365 Plans, iBS can help businesses integrate these two products together, to achieve seamless productivity in their daily operations and reap the benefits of email archiving.