A little background here. My question was, why, when GRISD has such an excellent technology department, are they handling what ought to be a simple automated process by the servers off to teachers to do manually, thus opening the door to a. accidental deletions b. faulty and random searches and c. an additional process to be sure everyone complies? I wondered what GRISD was using to do archiving on their server as I had read about some case studies involving GWArchives (and spoke to a messaging architect for Groupwise) and the process was simple, automatic and didn't involve end users.

Well. Found out that, in fact, GRISD IS using GWArchives. So any explanation that says that doing it with the teachers is better is a baloney argument.

I also really don't believe that there isn't enough disk storage to archive the emails nightly and then have a policy to delete it after X amount of retention period. Not when I saw the presentation Doug Mc gave a few months ago about virtual servers and a fiber pipe going to a SAN. Would be interesting to find out exactly how much storage is in that SAN, how much of it is being used, both generally and specifically for email and archiving, and what the projections are for when new disk space would be needed. Because Doug is an excellent IT person, cautious and thoughtful, and I doubt he would be having the servers living on the fringe of running out of storage.