Scott Feltmann's Blog

One of the new features of Exchange 2010 is the ability to perform archiving on user mailboxes that reside on the Exchange 2010.  With the combination of Outlook 2010 users now have the ability to have a primary mailbox which will host their Exchange 2010 production data and an Archiving mailbox which will store mail items based on the users preference or organizational Retention Policies.  I say Outlook 2010 because as I write this Outlook 2007 is not able to support the users archive mailbox.  Microsoft’s idea on archiving is to reduce the number of items and the size of a users production mailbox thus improving the performance on that production mailbox, while the archiving mailbox will retain the users old mail and will have a slower level of performance users will still be able to be search for material.  The other benefit to the Archiving piece in Exchange 2010 is that it is included with Exchange 2010!  Basically small organizations will not need to buy another solution to perform archiving.    Please note however, that in order for a user to benefit from Exchange 2010 Archiving an Outlook 2010 Enterprise CAL is required. 

So, from a user perspective the way archiving works is that a user is presented with two mailboxes (similar in Outlook 2007 where a user opens their mailbox and another user’s mailbox in the folder list).  Their folder list has two mailboxes, their primary mailbox and an archiving mailbox.  The advantage to using the archiving feature is that now all legacy mail items are stored on the exchange server where they can be properly backed up and managed by IT.  The shortfall to the Microsoft version of archiving is that the users archiving mailbox is stored in the same database as the users production mailbox.  I have heard rumors that storing the production mailbox and archive mailbox in the same database will change in the future, but no time frame has been released for this.  Depending on what you’re using for a storage platform that archiving data could reside on expensive disk, which would rather be used for production data.  Another thing to note is that archiving does not support the calendar!  I actually found this rather surprising being that many people (including myself) will want to go back and look at their calendar to figure out what they were doing say a year ago.  While this data resides on the calendar in the production mailbox it would still be nice to off load some of this data to the archive. 

Now, going back to archiving, technically it can be considered records management.  The reason I say this is because an organization is managing what to do with the data stored in the users mailbox.  Records Management has a number of options that can be configured through Retention Policy Tags.  The data in the mailbox can be moved to archive, move to deleted items folder, delete and allow recovery, permanently delete, or mark as past retention limit.

The MoveToArchive action moves a message to the user’s archive mailbox. Messages are moved to a folder in the archive mailbox with the same name as the source folder in the user’s primary mailbox.

The MoveToDeletedItems action moves messages to the Deleted Items folder. This emulates the behavior experienced by users when they delete a message. Items in the Deleted Items folder can be moved back to the Inbox, or any other mailbox folder. Depending on the user’s mailbox settings in Microsoft Office Outlook Web App or Microsoft Outlook, the Deleted Items folder may be emptied when the user logs off Outlook Web App or closes Outlook. You can also create an RPT for the Deleted Items folder to take the required action on messages in the folder after a certain period.

The DeleteAndAllowRecovery action emulates the behavior when the Deleted Items folder is emptied or the user hard deletes a message. When this happens, and deleted item retention is configured for the mailbox database or the user, messages move to the Recoverable Items folder. The Recoverable Items folder, also known as the dumpster, provides the user another chance to recover deleted messages.

The PermanentlyDelete action permanently deletes a message. When this action is applied to a message, it’s purged from the mailbox. This action is like a deleted message being removed from the Recoverable Items folder. After this happens, the user can no longer recover the message.

The MarkAsPastRetentionLimit action marks a message as past the retention limit. Supported Outlook clients (Outlook 2010 and Office Outlook 2007) display messages that are past their retention limit using strikethrough text. Users who use a supported client notice the changed display and recognize the message as expired, and they can be encouraged to take further action, such as deleting the message or moving it to the archive mailbox. This action is intended to make expired messages noticeable, which encourages users to follow the organization’s messaging policies, and makes an action such as deleting the message unnecessary. This can be used as the initial step to create awareness about MRM.

Since I’m focusing on archiving I will stick with that angle.  I should point out however organizations like to retain items for legal reasons or like to delete items for legal reasons.  Either way the records management included in Exchange 2010 can perform both.

In my next post I will discuss the steps required to enable archiving.