White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced at a 1:45 p.m. press briefing yesterday that he was unable to send out the customary week-ahead memo as the White House e-mail system was "not working so well." D.C. reporters got their next e-mail from the White House around 8:30 this morning indicating that the outage lasted most of a day.Combine this with the last administration's neglecting, or refusing, depending on your political point of view, to install an e-mail archiving solution and "oops" losing backups of many messages that may shed light on historical events and you have to start worrying about the competence of the IT people over there.

Given our first Hawaiian president's well-known predilection to use his BlackBerry and the campaign's fine use of e-mail and I'm hoping this glitch is just the result of systems left over from the Bush administration. Even so, I'm going to give some unsolicited advice:

1) Get an Exchange archiving solution. The Presidential Records Act requires retention and a good archiving solution is the right way to get it. Get Symantec Enterprise Vault, Mimosa NearPoint, or any of dozens of others.

2) Get a high-availability solution such as Cemaphore's MailShadow or products from NeverFail, Marathon, etc., etc., etc.

My friend Cemaphore CEO Tyrone Pike even mentioned that they'd be glad to donate MailShadow to the White House as a patriotic act, and, I suspect, to get a little publicity. I'm sure I can convince an archiving vendor to chip in, too.

White House geeks can e-mail me at hmarks@nwc.com for any assistance they may need.