Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Version 1.0 won the Gold Award hands down in SearchExchange.com's Messaging: Backup and Recovery Products of the Year category for 2005. NearPoint is a backup and recovery and data management product for Exchange Server. It offers a comprehensive feature set including e-mail data protection and recovery, archiving, policy compliance, and self-service, message-level e-mail recovery for administrators and end users.

Mimosa Systems Inc.'s software is both a backup and recovery product and an archiving solution. It's based on standard Microsoft technologies and runs on any standard Intel server. It is disk-based and leverages real-time replication and low-cost disk storage, such as SATA RAID and NAS appliances, to provide continuous data protection and easy access to archived data from multiple Exchange servers.

NearPoint earned high marks across the board from our judges, but scored particularly high for innovation, ease of use and functionality. The ability to perform routine mailbox- and message-level restores in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days, as would be the case with typical backup and recovery methods, is a significant boon with this product. NearPoint can also significantly reduce the mailbox store size of Exchange servers.

One judge remarked, "This is truly next-generation data management for Exchange. With nothing installed on Exchange Server or Microsoft Outlook and seamless integration for backup, recovery, archiving and compliance, Mimosa stood out from the rest of the contenders in this category."

Since there are no agents or drivers to install on Exchange Server itself and no need to deploy clients to each desktop or laptop, Mimosa NearPoint leaves no footprints on Exchange servers or desktops. Our judges unanimously appreciated this aspect of the product model and that it is designed specifically for Exchange Server's unique architecture.

Pricing: Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange V 1.0 starts at $35 per mailbox.

SearchExchange.com editors