Archiving101.com

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.