Data retention compliance with Microsoft Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
One of the most attractive data retention features that Microsoft has released with Microsoft Exchange 2010 has been named Personal Archives. It has been designed to regain control over archived mail inside an organization. How? allowing users to store messages in an archive mailbox accessible through Microsoft Office 2010 or Microsoft Office Outlook Web App.
So, Microsoft has decided to set expiration date for Personal Storage Table (.pst) files because Personal Archives lets reduce unmanaged files, decrease .pst files discovery costs, reduce the risk of data theft improving security and and apply messaging retention policies; for a convenient data retention compliance.
Microsoft Exchange 2010 allows Personal Archives databases to be provisioned out of the Exchange server, permitting to store them on a different Exchange server connected to a dedicated storage subsystem in the same Active-Directory or in a cloud-based storage in cross-premises deployments.
Archive and retention policies play a key role on this letting you gain complete control over mail archive. It lets you move mail from a user’s primary mailbox to the archive mailbox after a specific period of time. The default archive and retention policy moves messages after 2 years; obviously this looks quite unreal to me. I haven’t seen anybody with a medium volume of mail traffic being able to maintain more than half year on an Exchange mailbox due company’s storage limitations.
And this has been also considered by Microsoft. Lack of storage has been always an important topic on internal companies discussions; this is why Archive Quotas has been introduced to let users know when they are reaching the permitted archiving limits.
Personal Archives comes enabled by default in Microsoft Exchange 2010; you just simply need to create (if you want) a separated database to store user’s archive mailboxes to keep everything a little bit more organized.
It can be enabled for users when you cerate them from the Exchange management console, just setting the option when requested.
To enable it for an existing mailbox using Exchange management console:
- In the console tree, navigate to Recipient Configuration > Mailbox.
- In the result pane, select the user you want to enable an archive for.
- In the action pane, click Enable Archive.
- A warning appears confirming that you want to enable the personal archive. Select archives destination mailbox and click OK.
To enable it using Exchange shell:
- Enable-Mailbox “Steve Palmera” -Archive -ArchiveDatabase “Archive Database”
With this Microsoft has gone one step ahead with Exchange, introducing one of the most useful capabilities under my point of view. If you want to extend this information check the links below: