In Acrobat 7, we introduced a PDF based solution for email archiving that could be used to convert emails and entire folders from MS Outlook into searchable PDF files. Since then we have continued to invest in this solution by adding support for Lotus Notes and providing advanced auto-archiving capabilities. It is a scalable, easy to use and reliable solution for ad hoc archiving of emails on the desktop. More after the break…
Some of the reasons we've heard why users might need to archive their emails include:
- Compliance with Regulatory or audit Requirements:
- Companies in certain industries (e.g. healthcare, legal, financial services) are required by law to archive specific records, including email, for specific time periods.
- All electronic data including emails is subject to the discovery process. When required by law, you are required to share all your emails with investigative agencies.
- Line functions like Finance, Admin are required to save certain type of email communication like approvals etc for audit purpose. They resort to printing these emails and filing them in absence of a robust solution.
- Archiving emails related to a project, case hearing etc.
- After completing a project before moving on to another project, users can archive their project related emails to a secure archive and upload to a shared folder/document management system. If required, they or any team member (with valid access) can access these mails anytime in future.
- An employee moving to a new project or company can convert his emails to an archive and hand that over as part of transitioning his responsibilities.
And PDF can be an excellent format for archiving your email:
- PDF being an open format eliminates the dependency on proprietary mail formats.
- PDFs are platform independent and can be viewed/printed on any computer having free Adobe Reader which is widely available.
- Once converted to PDF, you can work on your emails in Acrobat in conjunction with other PDF documents.
- You will still be able to open PDF mail archives created today many years from now.
Here are some of the highlights of the Acrobat email archiving solution:
- Intuitive and Easy to use interface for archiving emails. You can convert selected emails or entire folders to PDF in a single click, using the menu option:.
You can also set up automatic archival of specific folders using the Automatic Archival feature. This feature incrementally archives the newer emails present in the specified folders at every scheduled run.
- Support for Outlook and Lotus Notes: Acrobat 9 supports MS Outlook XP, 2003 & 2007 and Lotus Notes 6, 6.5, 7 & 8 for email archiving.
- Advanced search functionality: PDF emails include the complete mail header info for the emails. These emails (including non PDF attachments) can be quickly located using Acrobat’s advanced search functionality.
- Rich consumption experience: Acrobat 9 includes a flash based UI for users to easily view/print/search their archived emails. For more details, you can look at Rick Borstein’s video demonstration in his blog posting here.
So what are you waiting for? Start archiving your emails using Acrobat and share your experience with us. We look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks!
Aman Deep Nagpal, Acrobat Product Manager
Is this feature available for Entourage or older versions of Outlook?
[Kevin - See above. Acrobat 9 supports Outlook (Windows) XP, 2003 & 2007 and Lotus Notes(Windows) 6, 6.5, 7 & 8 for email archiving. Thanks. - Dave]
I love this feature but it is incredibly resource intensive and while running it pretty much stops me from being able to use Outlook. Can you not run it in the background?
[In A9, we added a functionality to run PDF conversion in non-intrusive mode. In A9, while mails are being converted to PDF, you can minimize the conversion dialog, and resume working on your emails in Outlook or Lotus Notes without any interference from the conversion dialog. - Aman]
I cannot get the Acrobat 9 Pro archiving to work with Lotus Notes 8.0.2. Don't get the options under Archive, so I can't archive any e-mails
[Dorothy - You should see the "Acrobat Convert to PDF" options under the Action Menu. If you don't find the options here, you can consult this document which will help you troubleshoot. Finally, you may need to contact Adobe Support directly. Sometimes when enterprises have customized Lotus Notes installations, it can interfere with Acrobat availability within Lotus Notes. - Aman]
Please advise if there are plans to port this feature over to Entourage. Our law firm switched from PC to Mac and (wrongly) assumed that such a basic and essential feature would be available.
Any recommended work arounds?
[Christopher - There are currently no plans to port this to Entourage. On the Mac, you could create PDFs from individual emails and then combine all of those into a PDF Portfolio. - Dave]
I love this feature, but when I upgraded to Acrobat 8 and Outlook 2007 from Acrobat 7 and Outlook 2003, the PDFs I create no longer have bookmarks by date, sender, ect to sort with. Is there something I am not seeing in Acrobat 8 that will allow me to create the bookmarks like Acrobat 7 did?
[In Acrobat 7, if you archived multiple emails into a single PDF, Acrobat would club all the e-mails into a single flat PDF. By flat, I mean it would be a single document in which each email would begin in a new page after the previous e-mail. In order to make navigation easier, Acrobat 7 would create bookmarks by date, sender etc so that you could navigate. However, this was still cumbersome to navigate because it was not easy to sort the emails by date, sender etc., especially if you were archiving tens or hundreds of emails.
In Acrobat 8 this behavior was changed such that each e-mail was an individual PDF clubbed together into a container PDF “package” (called PDF Portfolio from Acrobat 9 onwards). A PDF Portfolio is a PDF with the ability to have one or more PDFs inside it. The advantage this provided was that you could now easily sort e-mails by sender, subject, date etc. as well as extract individual e-mails out as PDFs of their own. When you open such a PDF you should see a view where the emails are displayed as a list in the top half of the page and clicking on any email will show a preview in the bottom half. Clicking on any field (such as “Date”) in the header column of the top half will sort the list by that field - Sanjoy]
Can we reply to emails in the PDF file, after the emails have been archived?
[Micah - Sure. Just give it a try. In the resulting PDF the sender's name and the recipients' names become click-able links. So to reply to the sender, you just need to click on the link in the PDF and a new email will be created. - Dave]