Partner Guide - View Archiving

Table of Contents
1. How do I create and manage my customer archives? 
     Partner Control Center: 
     Who can have access
     Key Features of the tool are
     Provisioning
     User Management
     Creating additional user

      Email Notification
     PCC User Roles 
     Navigation 

     Account Creation 

2. Managing Customer Archive Accounts 
      Listing the Users 
      Audit Reports 
      Billing Reports

3. How do I contact Support if needed? 
      Opening a Support Ticket 
      Working with Support 
      Support Escalations 

4. How do I request Services – Import or Export? 
      Bulk Data Export Service 
      Why the need for a Bulk Export? 
      Requesting a Bulk Export from Sonian Services 
      Additional information 
      How long will export of data take? 
      Completion of Export 

   5. Data Import Service 
       Legacy Data Import Process and Workflow Requirements 
       Overview: Data Import Process 
       Import Data Do’s and Dont’s 
       Special PST Import Guidance 
       Compression & Encryption 
       How to get the data to Barracuda 
       How long will my import of data take? 
       Guideline Time frames for Import 
       FAQ’s 
6. Archive Cancellations 
     Cancellation of The Archive Services

1. How do I create and manage my customer archives?

Partner Control Center

The View Archive Partner Control Center (PCC) is an application for Partners to partly manage their customer's archive accounts.

Who can have access:

Partners that have a signed agreement with Barracuda and are on a monthly recurring royalty plan can request access.

Key Features of the tool are:

• Create new archive accounts
• Review statistical data in relation to an archive account
• Manage User accounts (i.e. reset password)
• All activity is audited

Limitations/Considerations of usage are

Provisioning:

• Any account you create, you will be charged for each mailbox actively journaling to the archive
• Example: 1 new account is created with 10 mailboxes journaling to the archive. Partner will be invoiced contracted rate for 10 mailboxes.
• To cancel an account, please contact [e-mail] and cc: [e-mail]
• Partners that have integrated their customer control panel with the view archive via the API, you will manage your accounts using the account statuses (delete, suspend, etc.). There will be no need to contact Barracuda via email.

User Management:

• It is not possible to create new users for an archive account via this control panel. Any new user account must be created from with the archive account, by the customer.

 Granting your Support/Admin users access to the PCC

Upon approval, the Sonian/Barracuda Archive Tech Support Team will create a single user account that will have role privileges to create additional users to access PCC.

Creating additional users:

Select ‘Managers’ from the left-hand side navigation bar; then select ‘New’ icon near top right and complete the form

 

Email Notification:

The target recipient will be sent an email, asking then to confirm. They must click the link within 24 hours:

PCC User Roles

There are two roles that can be granted to users for PCC, PCC Administrator & PCC Manager.   Descriptions are below.

For the Typical Admin user, we recommend that they are given the PCC Manager Role.

Additional features the PCC Administrator will also see (soon), will be additional Audits features that allows the partner to request a list to CSV, of all of their accounts.

Navigation:

Navigate through the portal using the following options:

• Accounts: - Will list all the accounts assigned to your partner account
• Managers: - Will show a list of Users authorized to access the portal (Admins only will see this)
• Audit Reports: - The Control Panel auditing feature, used to track all user access and actions on PCC (cannot be used to see customer account audits).
• Find: - Use to quickly locate a customer account
• New: - depending on the page you are on, will enable you to:
  • Create new Archive Account
  • Create new PCC user

Generate new Audit report

Account Creation

To create a new account, From the ‘Accounts’ navigation page.

• Select new.
• Complete the form

Account creation walkthrough:

Account Name must be unique in the archive world, upon submission if the Account Name has previously been used, it will advise on the screen. Change the account name to something else.

Site Name, this will be used to provide a unique URL entry for access via the cloud. Again, must be unique in the archive world (No spaces or special characters). If a site-name applied is already utilized, it will advise upon submission of the form

External ID used only where partners want to apply a tag that matches their internal reference for the customer account in question. Must also be unique.

Mailbox Count, this entry is to be used to identify how many unique mailboxes the customer will be journaling to the archive service. As a partner, it is your responsibility to ensure that this value remains true and up to date.

Add customer Address details:

Inclusion of Email Domains:

It is required that the email domains that will be journaled to the archive account be entered upon creation.

Select the + to add a domain, you will also have the option to add multiple domains if needed,  (it is possible to update these after account creation to manage the domains after creation in the account management section)

Administrator details:

Upon creation of any archive account, it is necessary to create the first administrative user to access the archive account.

Upon submission of the new account form, an email will be sent to the Admin user, advising them to create their password. They will have 24 hrs. in order to complete the password setup before the token in the email expires.

Should the token expire, the ‘user’ will need to navigate to their unique URL for their archive and submit a forgotten password process, completing either their username or the email address, where a new token will be submitted.

2. Managing Customer Archive Accounts

From navigation page ‘Accounts’, identify or search for the customer account you want to review/manage.

Select the Manage link on the far right of the list.

When an account is selected, the options available to edit are in blue

1. Account name
2. Indicator as to health of the archive, whether actively journaling or not
3. Storage summary statistics
4. General account information details
   1. Account name can be changed, for the rare occurrence that it is needed to be changed

5. Customer’s unique URL to access the archive  
   1. This can be edited, will take change immediately.  
6. Mailbox count, the number of mailboxes set that will be journal to the archive
7. Link to the Manage Users page
8. Archive Account Creation Date / Migration from the old service Date

Account Name: option to change the account name.
URL Edit: Option to adjust the URL (Site-name) that the customer would use to access the archive via a browser.

Manage Users: Ability to manage users: Select Users, to be presented with a list of existing users that have been created via the Customer from within the application itself or via a customer API integration from within your own control panel.

NOTE: It is not possible to create additional users to access any customers archive from this PCC application. Any additional users must be created via your own API integrated control panel or from within the archive application itself when logged into a customer account (i.e., the customer creates an additional user). The sole purpose is to not present a loophole that allows external influences create access to a customer account, where not authorized to do so.

Listing the Users

To manage any user, select EDIT upon the chosen user, to open the following:

The management of a user to access a customer’s archive is quite self-explanatory, and mirrors exactly what a customer has within their own archive account, with the exception you cannot create new users for a customer’s archive.

Audit Reports

The PCC interface comes with a fully functional auditing tool that will enable you to audit all activity performed through the PCC application. This can be accessed from the home screen on the left-hand side navigation bar, AUDIT REPORTS.

When accessing the audit page, any reports that you have created previously will appear.

Create a new Audit Report

To generate a new audit report, select the NEW, link at the top right of the screen. Enter in the details relating to the date range you want to audit upon,
select create.

Audit report generation is a batch processing action, it could take some time to complete the reports.

Upon Completion of the report generation, you access the report. If the page does not refresh, please logout of PCC, then back in again, check to see if the report has completed.

Reports must be downloaded as a CSV file to view.

Example of a report:

Billing Reports

Overview:

Billing reports is a mechanism for the partners to quickly pull a listing of all active accounts for the selected environment.

Billing reports are automatically generated on the 2nd day of every month at 2:00am UTC and once complete are available for downloading from with the UI. 

This can be accessed from the home screen on the left-hand side navigation bar, BILLING REPORTS

3. How do I contact Support if needed?

Opening a Support Ticket

By sending an email to [e-mail], this will open a support ticket.  Responses will be made through this ticket and will ensure the issue is tracked to resolution.

When opening a support ticket, be sure to include as much information as possible regarding the issue including the archive URL so that we can assist you as quickly as possible.

Working with Support

Data that is stored in the archive is encrypted whilst at rest, it is not possible for anyone to access your data if they have not accessed the archive via the application.

Occasionally, there may be instances during a support request where the support team may request whether they can gain access to your archive account, for a limited period of time to gather further details of the experience being reported. This will help to narrow down issues experienced.  

There are two options available to you.

Create a Technical Support Access Account:

You would create a Support access account/user to your archive.  This support account would have the Archive Administrator role and Search Administrator roles applied.  You would provide the Username and Credentials to the support representative who will confirm access to the archive, and may temporarily set a new password, if credential details were provided in a support ticket.

After the support assistance has completed, you can delete/disable the user account so the support team have no access after.

Remote Web Share Session:

Support can also be provided using remote web access services.  You can provide your own remote web share service, or we can assist and provide.

Support Escalations

If at any time an issue you feel an issue needs to be escalated please escalate by emailing Lynn Beck at [e-mail] and/or Paul Bashford at [e-mail] 

4. How do I request Services – Import or Export?

To request Professional Services a ticket must be opened by sending an email to [e-mail] and cc’ing [e-mail]

Please include the URL used to access the login page of the archive as well as a detailed description of the service that is being requested.

If an export is being requested, in addition to the URL of the archive, also include –

• Format of the export (EML or PST)
• How you would like to receive the data (Encrypted Links or AWS Device)
  • If an AWS Device is chosen please also include, contact name, address and phone number of where the device is to be shipped

 Bulk Data Export Service

The purpose of this document is to provide clear guidance to our customers and partners  on the rules of engagement regarding request for exporting data. The View Archiving Service Delivery team enforces these guidelines.

Within this document there will be several reference items that are also available to review online, links will be provided to their source locations. Access to these documents are also available when using the Email Archiving application, under the Help link.

It should be clearly noted that any data required to be exported from the archiving service that does not currently fit in with the ‘standard’ service offering will be subject to a Statement of Work (SOW) and special pricing.

The standard service offering includes the export of data into EML (raw data) or PST format by date range. 

*Note: There is a per GB charge for all exports completed by this Export Service.  Please view your contract for this pricing. 

Why the need for a Bulk Export?

Sonian View Archiving provides the ability to perform the exporting of data from within the UI.  Limitations of the self-service exporting are:

• 30,000 message maximum
• 5 GB size limitation.

An export of data larger than the above limitations requires either breaking down the search into a smaller result set or a request for a Bulk Export from Sonian Services.   For instructions on how to export data from within the UI please view the Initiating a New Export section of our documentation.

 Requesting a Bulk Export from Sonian Services

 To request an export please open a Sonian Technical Support ticket by sending an email to [e-mail] and cc'ing [e-mail]

   Please include the following information:

• Account Name and URL to the Login Screen
• The format that the data is to be exported to (EML or PST)
• How would you like the data returned?
  • Secure Links to download the exported data*
  • AWS Snow Device (add’l one-time fee on top of per GB Export fee does apply) 
    • If an AWS Snow Device is needed, please provide the contact’s name, address and phone number the device will be shipped to.  
  • Is the customer leaving the service? If so, should the account be tagged as expired after the completion of the export?

*Note: Secure links are available for 7 days at which time they will expire, and the data will no longer be available for download.

Additional information

• The Services team does not export data by user
• If an export by user is needed, the customer will need to conduct the searches and provide us with Search ID and number of messages within each search.  See kb article on obtaining search IDs HERE
• If specific searches are in need of exporting, the customer will need to provide a search ID and number of messages within each search
• Anything outside of the standard exporting service provided by Sonian/Barracuda  is subject to a Statement of Work (SOW) and special pricing.

How long will export of data take?

* These are rough estimates and should not be considered a commitment or SLA.

Completion of Export

Upon completion, the Services Delivery team  will respond to the ticket confirming the export has been completed and will provide all information available, such as the size of the export.    The services team will also provide either the Secure links for downloading the exported data or information regarding the AWS device

The support ticket will then be marked as resolved.

5. Data Import Service

The purpose of this document is to provide clear guidance to our partners & customers on the rules of engagement regarding submitting data to be ingested into the View Archiving platform. The data submitted would be intended to be ingested into a respective customer’s archive account. These guidelines are enforced by Service Delivery, the team that manages the ingestion/imports processes.

It should be clearly noted, that any data required to be ingested to the service, that does not currently fit in with the ‘standard’ service offering, will be subject to a Statement of Work (SOW), and special pricing included

It is advised that any import of legacy data will come at a charge. Please discuss the applicable charges with your Account Manager.

The standard service offering comprises of the submission of PST, MBOX or zipped EML type data that requires no special extraction or preparation procedures.  Submission of data in any other format not meeting our standard service offerings will be subject to a SOW.

Data submitted, not meeting the standard service requirements, and not previously identified as requiring a SOW will be rejected by Barracuda until an agreed SOW has been met. Barracuda will not work on any data sets not meeting the requirements; thus a perception of delay will be incurred, but not at Barracuda’s expense.

This document supersedes any other document/notice that you may have received in the past.

 
Legacy Data Import Process and Workflow Requirements

Barracuda provides add-on services to allow customers to ingest their legacy email, either from their current mail platform or from previous archiving platforms, into their archive account. The legacy email will be processed through the same secure index and storage process as your daily journal email. To process a legacy data import the following workflow and requirements should be followed to ensure a quality and timely completion of a legacy data import.

*Note - Any deviation of these requirements will result in data being returned to you ordestroyed or will incur additional surcharges.

Overview: Data Import Process

Preparing the Data to be Imported

Barracuda will successfully import a variety of mail file formats and has adopted a standard of preparation that is replicated for the following formats, PST, zipped EML/RFC822, and MBOX. (Any data received outside of these formats will require an SOW prior to importing)

Important: The below requirements are not flexible. They must be followed, or you are at risk of your import data being returned to you or destroyed.

For all File Types (Requirements)

1. No co-mingling of file types in a single directory or folder or compressed file.
2. Supported compression formats: zip, tar.gz, and 7z (anything outside of is subject to an SOW prior to importing)
3. File and path names must contain no spaces or special characters other than @ . _ or –
4. File extensions must be lowercase (.eml not .EML)
5. Eml/rfc822 files MUST be provided in a zipped format.
6. File directory structure within zip files must be no more than 4 levels deep. (File levels are sub-directories within the top-level zip file, and do not represent zips within zips.)
7. Each zip archive provided to Barracuda, should only contain one level of compression. (No zips within zips )
8. The names of zip file(s) provided to Barracuda must include the extension of the file-types contained within. (IE: <yourcompanynam.eml .zip or SMTPaddress. eml. zip or yourcompanyname.pst.zip or SMTPaddress. pst .zip>
9. Compressed file names must contain the company's name or subdomain.

Import Do's and Dont's

Do:

• Closely follow the requirements outlined above and throughout this document

 Don’t:

• Send zip files that contain other zip files.
• Send zip files that contain files deeper than four levels from the root.
• Send multipart/split zip files where the sum of all the parts is larger than 250 GB
• Send zip files which contain more than one type of data (for example pst and eml in a single file)
• Include file types within the zip files which cannot be imported into the archive (for example: there should be no loose .pdf or .jpg etc files commingled within your email files.)
• Include spaces or special characters other than @ . _ or - in file names
  (for example not “Sent Items.pst” dsinger(1).zip, or Dave ’ sMail.zip)
• Include spaces or special characters other than @ . _ or - in path names
  (i.e. not \2012 Archive\dec.zip)
• Send uncompressed eml/rfc822 files.
• Place more than 100,000 files into a single zip (i.e. 100,000 individual .eml files in a single zip)
• Do not password-protect pst files.  (Zipped files containing psts, eml, or mbox files may be password-protected.
• Do not send pst files larger than 45 G in size.

*Note - Any deviation of these requirements will result in data being returned to you,
destroyed or will incur additional surcharges.

 Special PST Import Guidance

The PST (Personal Storage) file format is used by Microsoft Outlook to store messages on local desktops and network drives.

PST files may be generated either directly by your users OR via an automated application such as exmerge, which extracts messages from your Exchange Server into a collection of pst files.

**A conversion process takes place during the import which converts all messages within the PST file to a raw data format. It is recommended that, while searching for a user's legacy data within the archive, both the user's name/alias and their SMTP address are used.

We recommend that individual uncompressed PST files sent for import should be no larger than 45 GB in size. Barracuda will attempt to import larger PST files but, in general, PST files larger than 45 GB are more likely to be corrupt or to encounter errors during the conversion to eml format which precedes import. This can cause a delay in the import process or an incomplete set of messages in the archive.

When sending PST files for import, the PST files themselves must not be secured with any password protection

The PST files may be encrypted in a password-protected 7-zip file (see Compression & Encryption below) and the 7-zip files may be copied to a Snow device for shipment or uploaded to a site for Barracuda to download and import into the archive.

When using 7-zip for PST files, please create a separate 7-zip file for each PST file.

Compression & Encryption

We recommend the use of 7-zip for compression and strong AES-256 bit encryption. 7-zip can be downloaded at no charge. ( http://www.7-zip.org/ ).

The illustration above shows a folder that you have locally/on your network containing a volume of files. These files can be .eml/rfc.822 or pst, but each zip file should contain files in a single format type -- not files with different formats within a single zip file. The name of the zip file should identify the type of files contained - for example companyname eml .zip or [e-mail]. pst .7z.

 To encrypt using 7-zip

• Open 7-zip File Manager
• Browse to location of files to be sent for import
• Once you have successfully browsed to the folder, highlight all files to be included in a single zip file
• Next click File from the menu items, then click 7-zip , and then click add to archive
• Change the compression level to fast
• Enter password if encryption is desired ( When encrypting files for an import, all files for a given import ticket must have the same password.)

 How to get the data to Barracuda

There are two methods to deliver the data to Barracuda.

1. Upload the data to a site and provide Barracuda with credentials to download the data. Some examples of sites which can be used are your own FTP site, Box.net, G-Suite, O365 One Drive (included with O365), Amazon s3, Azure or Google Cloud Storage. This is the fastest and least expensive way of sending the data and is particularly suitable for small and medium sized imports.
2. Open a support ticket with Barracuda to arrange for AWS to ship a Snow device, which is the property of AWS, to the location where the data is present on the network. You will have a specified number of calendar days to copy the data to the Snow device and turn the Snow device over to UPS for return shipment to AWS.
   There is a surcharge for shipping the data on a Snow device in addition to the usual per gigabyte import charge. There is also an additional daily charge if the Snow device is not turned over to UPS for return shipment within the specified number of calendar days of receipt. It is necessary to connect the Snow device to your network, assign it an IP address, and transfer the data with a particular software application.

 How long will my import of data take?

Processing data for ingestion can take a varied amount of time to complete. This KB article is provided to help you to understand your possible options for improving the time frame to import.

Importing Legacy Data items is a common everyday process here at Barracuda and our cloud optimized infrastructure is designed to provide the best value of service for everyone!

When Barracuda conducts a process to import data for any client, there are many factors that will need to be considered that can affect how long an import process will take to complete. Some of these factors are, Number of individual PST, or EML folders overall, size of a PST files, complexity of a folder structure housing the messages, number of documents and number of messages.

All of these factors are taken into consideration when we process your data. Other factors that are taken into consideration are: extracting compressed / encrypted data, data conversions, and securely storing, encrypting and indexing all the files.

When we are ready to process your data for import, we assign a set number of resources to churn through the data. The number of compute power resources utilized are aligned to the standard import costs that have been provided to you.

Guideline Time frames for Import

Completion of Import

Barracuda will update the ticket confirming the import has been completed and the uncompressed size of the total import. The support ticket will then be marked as resolved but will not close until 3 days after completion date.

It will be expected that, should  there be any discrepancies with the data imported, that these be reported to Barracuda Service Delivery within 30 days of the import completing. After this period, it will be harder to help identify/rectify any issues.

 FAQ’s

Why do some imports go faster than others?

• Once files are converted into a standard MIME/RFC.822 format they are inserted into a queuing service for secure archiving and indexing. The processing rate varies at this stage is based upon a few factors.
  • Size/profile of email attachments that go through a text extraction service.
  • Availability of excess computer services.
  • Capacity consumed by day-to-day archiving activities (daily journaling, exports, other import tasks, etc.)
  •  

What can be done to help improve the efficiency of importing this data?

• Supply messages in compressed EML format. The most efficient method to process any email data will be to provide this to Barracuda as a standard MIME/RFC.822 format (EML).
• EML files must be compressed before being submitted. The most efficient size for the zip files is 25 G or less.
• When data is submitted as PST files, we recommend that single PST files do not exceed 45GB and are proved not to be corrupt if attempted to open via an outlook client.
• PST Files should NOT be password protected. Password protected PST files cannot be processed by the service and may require that the data is re-submitted without any passwords. (It is fine to encrypt 7-zip files that contain PST files, but the PST files themselves should not be encrypted.)
•  

Can Barracuda speed things up?

• If there is a need for you to provide data that has urgent e-discovery needs then YES, the timeline for importing your data can improved by utilizing additional/dedicated compute resources at an extra premium cost to you.

Backup considerations

• Ensure you that you retain a copy of any data you supply to Barracuda, whether exported from your mail servers or standing legacy data from a file store.

Costs of Imports

• Barracuda charges a very modest, one-off fee for the import of data. The fee is calculated on size of the data supplied, that being a per GB charge for the data in an uncompressed state. If you have data that needs to be imported, you will be able to estimate the cost of the import when communicating with your service providers. There will be additional surcharges when the data is shipped on a Snow device or when the format of the data does not meet the standard requirements described in this document.

What happens to my mail files which I have supplied to Barracuda?

• The data supplied will be stored securely on Barracuda’s archive infrastructure, in readiness for processing.
• The data will be staged and ingested into your archive account. It will then be indexed into the archive as redundant copies of the data are made automatically. This indexing process makes the data searchable in the archive and the redundant copies ensure high availability of the data.

 

6. Archive Cancellations

If you are need to cancel an archive, a support ticket should be opened by sending an email to [e-mail] and cc’ing [e-mail]

Please include the following information within the Support ticket opened

• Name and URL of archive to be removed
• Is an export needed prior to the cancellation?
  • If an export is needed, please follow the procedure above for Bulk Export Service Requests

Cancellation of The Archive Services

Should you require to cancel the archive services, you will need to provide notice to your service provider in accordance with the agreed terms of service.

Details to provide:

1. Account Holders Name
2. Account Company Name
3. Any reference to an Account ID you have with your service provider
4. Date of cancellation of service (you may be required to issue notice period for cancellation)
5. Whether the data in the archive needs to be exported

If data is required to be exported from your archive, this can be performed via 2 methods:

1. Export the data yourselves via the control panel, noting that you are limited to a maximum 30,000 messages per export (you will have to export based on date ranges)
2. Contact your Service provider for a Bulk Export Service, note that charges are applicable on a per GB of uncompressed data exported.
3. Depending on the size of your archive, you may be able to export the data yourselves

    using the archive interface and downloading the data upon completion of each export. 

 Note if you adopt this method, you must ensure that you complete & download your exports prior to your service cancellation.

2. If you have high volumes of data in the archive, it will be more efficient to request a

    concierge service from your Service Provider to arrange to bulk export the data for you,

    and either provide you with links to download the data or have the data delivered to you

    on an Amazon AWS Snowball device.  Charges are applicable for this service.