As a long-time knowledge worker, I need to keep track of my messages and content. To do this, I rely on a corporate email system for my email messages and a separate archive system for legacy email and content. Over the past several decades, I've used various systems with varying degrees of satisfaction. Today, I'm lucky to be using what I consider to be the best systems on the market: Microsoft 365 (Exchange) email and Proofpoint Archive.
In this blog post, I provide an insider's perspective on why Proofpoint Archive works so well for employees by exploring three of its key benefits.
When I started at Proofpoint, the first customer success story I read was about a financial services firm. Surprisingly, the primary reason they chose Proofpoint was not related to e-discovery or supervision. Instead, they wanted to provide seamless access to legacy email for their employees. However, their incumbent archive made this process complex, cumbersome and time-consuming.
The client's business model involved acquiring companies and creating subsidiaries. During that process, they also acquired different email systems. Proofpoint made it easier for them to ingest legacy data from different email systems into a centralized archive and provision that data for secure, seamless access by the new their employees.
If you've been part of an acquisition or merger -- and your new company supports legacy data access -- Proofpoint can help streamline and simplify access to your legacy email. Plus, it comes with powerful, intuitive workflows that you can use to search your archive, and it gives you results in seconds. This level of performance is guaranteed by a financially backed service level agreement.
At Proofpoint, we maintain a rolling two-year window of email in Microsoft 365. Like other companies that have these rolling email windows, we're trying to reduce the attack surface and potential risk exposure of our email system and reduce the cloud storage needed to support it, which also means we'll have less data in our tenant to back up. But that also means the date of the oldest email I can access is only two years prior to the current date.
I've worked for Proofpoint for more than four and a half years, and sometimes I need to reference an email from more than two years ago. Clearly, I can no longer access it in Outlook. But that doesn't matter because Proofpoint Archive journals email from Microsoft 365. That means I can use the Personal Archive to easily access email that's older than two years, provided they're still within our retention policy.
If you're using Proofpoint for archiving, you can request to be provisioned for the Personal Archive to access legacy email -- if your company policy supports that. This will enable you to overcome search and retrieval limitations that are otherwise incurred with typical mailbox management.
I'm partial to using Outlook as the portal into my personal home email and my Microsoft 365 work email. However, I've never been a fan of its native search capabilities. Maybe it's because I've never taken the time to learn Outlook search in entirety since using it for nearly three decades. Instead, if I need to search for email messages using criteria that is more than just senders or recipients, I immediately default to using the Proofpoint Personal Archive search. I find it faster, more flexible and easier to use.
To see what I mean, check out the example below, which is a demo of the Proofpoint Personal Archive.
Let's start by checking how many archived messages are in the demo (Figure 1). If I run a search specifying no criteria, in just seconds I see that there is a total of 5,036 items in the archive.
Figure 1. Search interface for the Personal Archive demo.
Now, if I wanted to narrow the search results to the most relevant, I add criteria. For example, if I include "confidential" as a keyword, and I rerun my search, the results are reduced from 5,036 items to only 109 items (Figure 2). Note that the "hit highlighting" feature works similarly to Outlook search in that instances of the word "confidential" are highlighted in yellow.
Figure 2. Adding a keyword to cull search results in the Personal Archive demo.
To perform more complex searches using multiple keywords, I can use an intuitive Query Builder tool that enables me to include ANY or ALL entries (words) or exclude other words from my search. See Figure 3 below for configuring a search in Query Builder for messages that include the words "confidential", "acquisition" and "merger" but exclude the word "California."
Figure 3. Using Query Builder to easily configure multiple word searches.
Plenty of other criteria can also be added to narrow the results further. Let's say that I want to refine the existing search for "confidential" by focusing on messages that were specifically sent to me this year.
First, I'd expand "Senders/Recipients" and then I'd start typing my name in the Recipients field. As I type more characters, the list of recipients will grow smaller. And when I see my name, I simply click to select and then apply my selection.
Next, I enter "date" criteria -- this part of the search workflow makes entering date ranges extremely easy. Given that I wanted to focus on messages I received this year (2024), I expand on Date Range by clicking on the Date Range field. I choose the "This year" parameter, and the Date Range field is automatically populated to show January 1, 2024 to December 12, 2024 using the correct search term syntax (Figure 4). By clicking on Save, I preserve the criteria and can now run my iterative search.
Figure 4. Specifying a date range criteria for your search.
When I initiate the search with all the additional criteria, in a matter of seconds, I see that the results have been reduced from 109 items to only 11 items (Figure 5). And if this was a search that I run periodically, I can save it and rerun it later without having to reconfigure the search. Unless the search criteria defines a static date range like "today," the results will update accordingly based on when you actually run the search.
Figure 5. Reducing search results further by adding recipient and date range criteria.
For this entire example, I was able to show you:
For all these steps, it took me seconds to configure the searches, run them and receive results.
If your company is using Proofpoint Archive, ask if you can be provisioned for the Personal Archive. The key benefits are clear. It will make your life so much easier when you want to search for legacy data that is still within your company's retention policy.
Archive provides you with seamless access to legacy email. It can help you overcome search and retrieval limitations when your company uses mailbox management. And it provides you with powerful, end user search capabilities that are supported by a financially backed service level agreement. You get search in seconds, guaranteed.
If you're not using Proofpoint Archive, now is the time to investigate it. Ask your Proofpoint Digital Communications Governance (DCG)s Specialist or Account Manager for details about a limited-time promotion that will make your migration to Proofpoint Archive even easier than before.