Retention Policies and Email Archives

Archiving to a PST is fine for home users but it’s not a good archive solution for corporations. Corporate users should have a central archive governed by a retention policy. It makes good business sense, even in a poor economy, to use a dedicated archiving solution.

Every business needs to have a retention and archive policy. The retention policy will identify messages that need to be archived and how long the messages are kept. Along with promoting efficiency and reducing needed storage space, a consistently enforced retention policy is a benefit in the event of litigation. Explaining to a judge that the retention policy resulted in the destruction of all messages older than a certain date is much better than trying to explain why many messages and documents are missing.

The retention policy will cover which messages need to be retained, where they will be stored, and how long they'll be kept. A central archive, not individual PSTs on each desktop, is preferred. It's much easier to search one message store, not multiple PSTs on each workstation.

Once the policy is written, it needs to be enforced. This is easiest with a central archive. Some companies use backup tapes for the archive . While it will save money in these difficult economic times, backup tapes rarely fully support retention policies - it's an 'all or nothing' proposition with every message saved, regardless of the policy. If the employee edits a message, a copy of the original is not retained. Users also can delete items, regardless of the policy. Performing e-discovery on backups is a slow process as each tape needs to be restored then searched. Any cost savings is lost the first time the "archive" needs searched.

An email archive will store all email - including inbound, outbound, and internal email messages and attachments - including deleted items, and the original and modified versions of any edited messages. Because its easily searchable, it’s going to be cost effective and a good business decision.

Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Records Management

Michael B. Smith, author of Monitoring Exchange Server 2007 with System Center Operations Manager (Sybex; March 2009)

Any compliance and archiving project which is based on Exchange Server will be comprised of several pieces in order to build the entire solution. One of the pieces of that puzzle will almost certainly be Messaging Records Management (MRM). MRM is designed to allow you to define the disposition of messages of a certain message class and/or age.

A simpler form of MRM was present in Exchange 2003 as a part of the Recipient Policy called Mailbox Manager Settings. From one perspective, the Exchange 2007 MRM is just that feature on steroids. However, it has far more capabilities than Mailbox Manager (MM) ever did. Perhaps surprisingly, there is also one feature that was not carried forward into Exchange 2007 - the report that gets generated each time MM was run. Frankly, that’s not a huge loss.

As are many things in the Exchange 2007/Windows 2008 world, MRM is based on the creation of a MRM policy which gets applied to a user object. The MRM policy consists of a number of managed folders which have settings applied against them. A managed folder is basically any folder in a mailbox which has settings applied against it. No surprise, but there are specific names for each these. For your reference, they are:

… Managed Folder Mailbox Policy, which applies to a user object and contains a list of managed folders
… Managed Folder, a folder in a mailbox which has managed content settings
… Managed Content Settings, which applies to a managed folder

Managed Folders are either Default Managed Folders (i.e., the standard folders that you see in every mailbox) or Custom Managed Folders (which are folders created by the Mailbox Management Process if they don’t already exist in a user’s mailbox).

A quick word on licensing - Custom Managed Folders are only available if you have the Enterprise CAL for your Exchange users.
A managed folder mailbox policy is nothing more than a container for a group of managed folders and their associated content settings.

Now that you know what they are, what are these things for?

Managed content settings allow you to do two things, with quite a bit of granularity: [1] you can define the retention period of a mailbox item, and [2] you can decide where to journal the mailbox item.

As you may be aware, a mailbox item can be any of a variety of message classes. The ones that manage contents settings are aware of are: All Content, Calendar Items, Contacts, Documents, E-mail, Faxes, Meetings, Missed Calls, Notes, Posts, RSS Items, Tasks, Voice Mail, and Journal Items.

Based on any of these message classes, you can decide how long that item is to be retained in the managed folder, and what the final disposition of the item is. Your disposition choices are:
… simply delete the message (move to Deleted Items folder)
… shift-delete the message (immediately delete, but allow recovery)
… permanently delete the message (immediately delete, with no recovery)
… move the message to a custom managed folder
… mark the message as retention expired

As part of the same selection criteria, you can also define whether you want the message to be journaled. Journaling can occur to any mail-enabled object (mail-enabled user, mailbox-enabled user, contact, mail-enabled public folder). You can also choose what format (TNEF or *.msg) you want the message to be journaled in.

Once you have defined your managed content settings, it is a simple matter to identify groups of them and place them into managed folder mailbox policies. Then assign those policies to users, either at creation time or later (the New Mailbox wizard includes the option for setting the policy, you can also use the set-mailbox PowerShell cmdlet to set the policy on a user object).

This short article doesn’t do them full justice, but check them out - they can be a valuable addition to your compliance toolkit.

Automatic or Manual Archiving?

Other than AutoArchive being automatic, is there a difference between the manual and automatic methods?

Yes, along with control over the timing of the archive process, manual archiving allows you to easily override AutoArchive settings.

To perform an automatic archive, you need to enable archiving in Tools, Options, Other tab, AutoArchiving. While its faster to set a global default and apply it to all folders, you will need to change the settings on any folder you do not wish to have archived using the default setting. To configure per-folder settings, right click on the folder and chose Properties, AutoArchive tab. Note that Contacts cannot be Archived.

To prevent any specific item from being archived, you can set the "Do not autoarchive" flag property on the item. This is set in File, Properties of an open message (or any Outlook item). If you need to mark a lot of mail, you'll probably want add the "Do not autoarchive" field to the view - its much faster to click to enable the 'do not autoarchive' flag.

If you use the File, Archive command and choose "Archive this folder and all subfolders", you will archive the folder and subfolders, overriding the AutoArchive settings applied to each folder (right click, Properties, AutoArchive tab). A manual archive also gives users the option of Archiving individual items marked Do Not Archive.

Too many PST files?

"I have a user who's been migrated to a new machine. The user has 563 PSTs in Outlook 2003. I wish I were exaggerating. She literally has some of these with 1 email in them. She has all of them "opened" in outlook (she has them loaded, but not all are expanded). And... surprise, surprise, she's getting a lot of corruption in the PSTs, giving her problems opening emails and personal folders constantly. The original machine runs them just fine. It's old and slow, but it chugs along and doesn't seem plagued with this issue. She refuses to believe that having 563 PSTs open is a bad thing because they work on the old machine. Any suggestions? The obvious one of "Close them" isn't an option at this time, and merging them down isn't either. This user claims not to have time, and keeps referring back to the old machine where her setup has worked for 3 years."

Wow. I can't imagine trying to find anything or browsing through 563 top level folders in the folder tree. Using Outlook's native search tools would be slow since it can only search one PST at a time.

First, verify that Outlook 2003 SP3 is installed on the new computer and that Outlook is the same build number on both systems. A post-SP2 patch addressed some issues with large numbers of PSTs in a profile and it may help. To insure the problem is with Outlook and not the hard disk, run scandisk too.

It's possible that the process you used to attach the PSTs to the new profile caused problems - in this case, make a new profile and tell her to add the PSTs to her profile one at a time. (I'd do it, in hopes she'll decide so many PST files in her profile is not worth the effort.) You can redo your scripts so you add maybe 10 PST at a time. If possible, verify the newly added PST files are not corrupt before adding more.

Regardless, she needs to re-consider her refusal to close some and merge those she needs frequently. By merging these into a limited number of personal folders, or better yet, moving them into her Exchange mailbox, the messages will be backed up regularly and be accessible from any computer. Going back to the old machine takes time too - time she could use to merge some PST files.

Cumulative Update and Large DLs

In case you wondered what Microsoft meant when they said "For full Outlook functionality, you can install the Cumulative Update package that is associated with the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/?bid=967688. it looks like it is needed for large distribution list support and print range selection.

The first time I installed the Cumulative update and large DLs didn't work, I blamed "user error" (me!) but several readers needed to install both before they could create large distribution lists. You may also need the second update to enable the ability to select a print range. I recommend installing both updates.