Archiving101.com

Join me this Thursday for a webinar on How Exchange 2010 Handles Archiving and Retention: http://bit.ly/ajWrK3

I recommend that you attend this Ferris webinar on Nov4th to learn about the new Exchange 2010 features for archiving.  http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/04/exchange-2010-archiving-the-analyst%e2%80%99s-point-of-view-2/

Archiving is an important new capability for managing Exchange and email in general and the new Exchange 2010 promises to have all the features you need – or not!

Ferris has accused Microsoft of over selling the Exchange 2010 archiving features in this blog  http://www.ferris.com/2009/11/02/microsoft-oversells-e2010-archiving/  so it is critical to learn what the real story is.

Attend the webinar and listen to the experts debate this hot issue.

OK .. so Exchange 2010 will be  available to the general public coming November 9th and as I mentioned in an earlier post it is the archiving capabilities that a lot of people are looking at.  I’ve spend now quite some time to look over the functionality and am going to write a set of posts with items that you need to be aware of. Today I’d like to bring retention to your attention.  Retention in Exchange Server 2010 is accomplished with multiple retention options.  These policies can then be configured with actions on how to maintain and move data from the primary mailbox to the archive:

The first part is the Retention Policy Tag (RPT) which applies retention settings to the default folders (Inbox, Deleted Items and Sent Items) in a mailbox and all items that are in these default folders inherit this  folders policy tag.  Once a tag is applied to these folders, users are not able to change the tag, however they can apply a different tag to individual items in one of the default folders.  Now here is the catch, as you can create RPTs for the following default folders:

• DeletedItems
• Drafts
• Inbox
• JunkMail
• Outbox
• SentItems
• RssSubscriptions
• SyncIssues
• ConversationHistory

But retention Policy Tags are not supported for the Calendar, Journal, Notes and Tasks folders which means that you cannot set retention on all of the data in the users mailbox.

This morning at 11:30 Exchange 2010 reached its RTM status and is now on its way to GA later this fall/winter.

You can read more on it at the Microsoft Exchange team blog http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx

This is a question that has been asked many times.  During an upgrade to Exchange 2007 or even Exchange 2010 in the future, all mailbox data within the legacy Exchange 2003 Server would typically be migrated into the new Exchange 2007 Server. Since a migration will copy old, infrequently accessed, or fixed/static email data, it may be a time consuming and inefficient process depending on the volume of inactive data. The excessive bulk of this data will also impact performance and capacity on the new servers, and increase backup and restore times.

Using an email archiving solution prior to a migration delivers some distinct advantages:

• It identifies old or unnecessary email data so administrators can take informed, intelligent actions on whether to remove, archive, or migrate the data. This simplifies and streamlines migration to Exchange 2007.

• It retains archived email data in a format that can be accessed in the future to comply with various regulatory requirements and for e-discovery purposes. This eliminates any need for support or updates to legacy Exchange 2003 systems.

• It prevents from having to re-architect the storage tied to the Exchange 2007 system when the archiving system is installed after the migration as the Exchange 2007 storage sizing will be sized to include the inactive data which could contribute to 80% of the total storage.  Deploying the archive before also ensures that the storage for the Exchange Servers is adequately sized.

After a migration with email archiving, Exchange 2007 servers will be much more efficient by maximizing data storage usage and performance. The reduction of the storage footprint of the Exchange Server will also significantly improve the Backup and restore times. Email archiving provides ongoing benefits after the migration such as mailbox size and quota management so users no longer need to store data in PST files, and sophisticated search capabilities to enforce policies on inappropriate email content. While Exchange 2007 includes limited archiving in the form of Managed Folders and Journaling, these features do not provide a full solution for compliance nor storage management.