For the list of all release notes click here.
The following list will give a quick overview about the newest improvements that contentACCESS version 7.0 brings to you:
Microsoft 365 backup
✓ Secure your M365 data in couple of minutes
Experience peace of mind with contentACCESS backup for Microsoft 365, meticulously crafted for simplicity without compromising security. Safeguard your critical business data, including emails, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and team chats effortlessly. With seamless storage handling, implementing the 3-2-1 backup strategy is a breeze, ensuring redundancy and resilience. In just a couple of minutes, you can fortify your data against potential threats, ensuring it remains impeccably secure while minimizing administrative overhead.
✓ NEW Administration UI
The new Microsoft 365 Backup product is configurable through contentACCESS’s new and modern administration UI, which ensures swift and seamless setup. It reflects a decade of insights from our customers and professional services team, this redesigned interface combines sleek modernity with user-centric design. Experience unprecedented speed, simplicity, and efficiency in configuration, optimizing your productivity like never before.
Modern design: Step into a world of modernity with our revamped administration portal, featuring an intuitive interface designed to streamline navigation and enhance user experience.
Faster loading and work: Experience a new level of productivity with optimized workflows and faster loading times, ensuring that tasks are completed swiftly and efficiently.
Simplified operations: Say goodbye to complexity as we’ve fine-tuned every aspect of the portal to make operations simpler and more intuitive, from automated Azure Entra app registration to easier job setup.
Multi-tab support: Boost your productivity with multi-tab support, enabling you to work on multiple tasks simultaneously within the administration portal.
Multi-language support: Break down language barriers and enhance accessibility with support for multiple languages, allowing users to interact with the portal in their preferred language.
✓ Activation and configuration wizard
Initiate your contentACCESS journey effortlessly through our user-friendly product activation wizard. In just four straightforward steps, you’ll configure the system and swiftly initiate your backup process. The wizard also registers the Entra app, enabling easy connection to your Microsoft 365 data. Enjoy a hassle-free setup experience designed for maximum efficiency and simplicity. With our streamlined activation process, you’ll be safeguarding your critical data in no time.
✓ Just in time email backup
Introducing our innovative “Just-in-Time Email Backup” feature, powered by contentACCESS’s built-in SMTP server. With this functionality, Microsoft 365 can forward all incoming and outgoing email traffic to the contentACCESS SMTP server in near real-time. This ensures that no email goes unrecorded, minimizing the risk of accidental deletions and safeguarding your entire email communication. Rest assured, every sent and received email is securely stored, providing comprehensive protection and peace of mind for your organization’s critical communication data.
Additionally, our “Just-in-Time Email Backup” feature includes retrospective mailbox scanning to preserve users’ folder structures. Throughout this process, no backup occurs; instead, emails are only organized into their respective folders within the backup, maintaining the original user folder structure intact. This ensures that not only are emails backed up in real-time, but also that the organization and accessibility of users’ email backups are upheld, providing a comprehensive and user-centric email backup solution.
✓ Backup+ features
With the Backup+ feature enabled, every end user gains direct access to their backed-up data through our client tools. This empowers users to effortlessly browse, search, and even restore their data independently, eliminating the need for administrator intervention. When users have direct access to their backups, it ensures business continuity in critical situations, such as data loss or service outages, as they can always retrieve their data promptly, minimizing disruptions and maintaining productivity levels.
✓ Easy restore
The restore feature is a critical component of every backup solution. We designed to be as user-friendly as possible. Whether you need to recover a mailbox, a SharePoint site, or a Team, the process is straightforward. With just one click, you can initiate the restore process, effortlessly bringing back your data. For those instances where only a single item needs restoration, our client tool provides a seamless solution. You can browse or conduct full-text searches within the client tools, selecting the desired data with ease. Upon clicking restore, the data will be swiftly returned to its original location, ensuring a smooth and efficient recovery process.
✓ Storage redundancy and failover
We’re thrilled to announce significant enhancements to our storage redundancy and failover layer within contentACCESS. This crucial aspect of our system is now more transparent and simpler to configure, ensuring a seamless user experience. With the latest updates, the system now supports multiple secondary or replica storages alongside a primary storage, offering heightened redundancy and failover capabilities. What’s more, administrators have the flexibility to utilize cloud storages as replica storages, expanding their options for data storage. Additionally, the ability to set priorities for replicate storages adds another layer of customization and control. In the event of primary storage damage, administrators can seamlessly nominate a replica storage as the primary, ensuring uninterrupted access and modification to critical data. These enhancements collectively make the contentACCESS storage system exceptionally robust and powerful, further solidifying its position as a leading solution in data management and protection.
Common
✓ PostgreSQL support
We are thrilled to announce a groundbreaking enhancement in contentACCESS: full support for PostgreSQL as a database option! Until now, contentACCESS required SQL Server, often a costly investment for organizations without an existing license. With this update, we are breaking barriers and giving our customers the freedom to choose a powerful, open-source alternative—significantly reducing costs without compromising performance or reliability.
But that’s not all. This new flexibility goes beyond a single choice. With contentACCESS, you can now mix and match database types to suit your unique needs. Want to use SQL Server for one module and PostgreSQL for another? Go ahead! The choice is entirely yours, and contentACCESS ensures seamless compatibility across both database types without any restrictions.
This is more than just a feature update—it’s a game-changer for businesses aiming to optimize resources while staying ahead in their data management strategies. And to make this transition effortless, our enhanced setup process now includes the option to install PostgreSQL, ensuring you can get started with minimal effort.
This milestone represents our commitment to empowering our customers with greater freedom, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Welcome to a next chapter of contentACCESS!
✓ Simplified installation mode
Setting up contentACCESS has never been easier! With our new simplified installation mode, we’ve transformed the set-up process into a faster, more refined experience designed to save you time and eliminate frustration. Gone are the days of entering duplicate information—everything you need is collected in a single step, ensuring a smooth and efficient process from start to finish.
But it doesn’t stop there. The installer now handles critical configurations automatically, including SSL certificate generation, firewall exception setup, and even PostgreSQL installation when needed. To enhance security and ensure peace of mind, the setup process also enforces storing all entered credentials securely, so you’ll never have to worry about misplacing an essential detail.
This enhanced functionality is more than just convenience—it’s a smarter, more efficient way to get your contentACCESS environment up and running. Say goodbye to tedious setup steps and hello to a faster, easier start with contentACCESS!
✓ Wasabi storage support
contentACCESS now supports Wasabi storage, offering a cost-effective and reliable cloud storage option for businesses of all sizes. Wasabi provides an excellent alternative to traditional cloud storage, combining affordability with the high level of security and performance you expect.
For on-premises environments, Wasabi serves as an ideal backup storage solution to implement the 3-2-1 backup rule, ensuring your data is always protected and accessible. With contentACCESS’s replication service, configuring Wasabi as your backup storage is straightforward and efficient, making it easier than ever to enhance your data protection strategy.
This integration empowers businesses to reduce costs while maintaining a strong, secure, and flexible storage environment.
✓ Performance and stability fixes
Improvements were made to make the system faster and more stable, so your contentACCESS experience is now even better than it was before.
Email archiving
✓ Selective journaling
With our Selective Journaling feature, you can optimize your archiving process by filtering out emails that don’t need to be archived. This advanced feature allows you to simulate Premium Exchange Journaling filtering out email from archiving. One of the use-cases is to focus on external communications while excluding internal emails from being archived. But that’s not all—you can also use a wide range of email properties to create custom filters that suit your specific needs. Whether you want to filter by sender, recipient, subject line, or specific keywords, this feature gives you full control over what gets archived, ensuring that only the most relevant emails are stored, thereby conserving valuable storage space.
✓ Enhanced SMTP security
The latest version of contentACCESS introduces Enhanced SMTP Security, offering stronger protection and greater flexibility in managing your email receiving flow. Administrators can now control key security settings on a mapping level, allowing for tailored configurations that meet your organization’s specific needs.
With this enhancement, you can define advanced options such as specifying allowed senders, configuring transport header rules, and enabling SPF, DKIM, and DMARC verification to combat spoofing and improve email authentication. These features, along with many more, provide robust tools to secure and manage your SMTP operations, ensuring a safe and controlled email receiving flow while maintaining maximum flexibility.
✓ Optimized shortcut repair
We’ve made massive optimizations to our shortcut repair process, which dramatically reduces the time required for one of the most common repair scenarios: updating the server DNS name or protocol. Instead of re-generating the entire shortcut, our system now directly modifies the shortcut body during the repair operation. This enhancement ensures a much faster and more efficient process, allowing you to complete server name updates.
Additionally, we’ve added a new option within the shortcut repair job that lets you control this behavior, giving you greater flexibility and control over how repairs are handled.
SharePoint archiving
✓ Optimized metadata storage
contentACCESS takes a significant leap forward with improved metadata storage, delivering greater efficiency for SharePoint archiving. The enhancements reduce the database space required by contentACCESS to store SharePoint metadata by an impressive 5-8 times, offering noticeable benefits for your operations.
A smaller database not only translates into reduced storage costs but also enables faster processing, improving overall performance. Additionally, the reduced database size simplifies maintenance, making it more cost-effective and easier to manage in the long run. This optimization reflects our commitment to helping you achieve better efficiency and performance while lowering operational costs.
Update from older versions
✓ Update path: The update is supported by contentACCESS version 5.0 and later. Older versions must first be updated to contentACCESS 5.0 and after that they can be updated to the latest version.
If the update has been done for an earlier version than 3.3, after the update some of the new features must be configured manually.
One of these features is the Task runner, which requires resource storage where the export files will be stored. This storage must be configured in System -> System -> Resource storage settings. This store must be accessible by all contentACCESS nodes inside a cluster, so it is highly recommended to use a network share.
✓ .NET updated: In contentACCESS 7.0 all .NET Core based projects were updated to .NET 8. This affects the following components: Document Preview, Search V2, Administration UI (New).
✓ TLS 1.1 and older is disabled: In contentACCESS 6.1 and later the TLS versions older than 1.2 are disabled for security reasons
✓ Modern authentication for Email archive needs more permissions: we have switched from the deprecated Remote PowerShell to a REST based management API, which requires some more permissions on the configured Azure AD application
✓ Search V2 requires .NET Core: In 6.0 we have introduced the next version of search. The new search components targets .NET Core 6, which will be installed automatically by the search server setup.
✓ Teams and Teams chat job filter must be adjusted: In 5.4 we have fully redesigned the filtering capabilities in all Teams and Teams Chat jobs. Your existing Teams and Teams Chat jobs settings must be verified and adjusted after the update from 5.3 and earlier.
✓ Application pool identities changed: To increase the security, all application pools of contentACCESS are using the isolated IIS App Pool Identity. This requires a switch to the server-side rendering in contentACCESS Portal for email archive.
✓ .NET Framework support: From the 5.0 version, the minimum required .NET version for all applications was increased from 4.5.2 to 4.8.
✓ Mail app activation: As a result of redesigning the Mail app activation method in contentACCESS Email Archive, new permissions: “Org Marketplace Apps” and “User Options”, are needed to make the super user work correctly.
✓ Outlook forms: If the update has been done from an earlier version than 3.4, because of some internal changes in the email archive shortcut format, the Outlook forms must be updated to the latest version to maintain the correct functionality. For contentACCESS 3.8, the Outlook forms must be also republished due to the authentication changes.
✓ Remote file archiving: While updating from contentACCESS 3.6, existing remote agent definitions will be not working, since some of the database structures have been moved from the file system archive database to the tenant database.
✓ SQL server support: The minimum required SQL version was increased from MS SQL 2008 to MS SQL 2012.
✓ Redesigned filtering: The old filtering was converted to a new format. Therefore, after the update from 3.7 or earlier, we recommend the checking of all your job filtering settings.
Documentation
Please check the updated documentation and manuals.
contentACCESS and client apps user manuals
