Exchange 2010 Archiving and Retention

As the volume of e-mail continues to grow within organizations, the need to systematically archive this information has become a growing priority. Archiving can provide users a better e-mail experience by freeing up space inside a user's mailbox for better performance. Archiving also helps the organization better address compliance and legal electronic discovery requirements by making e-mail easier to manage and search. To address these needs, Exchange Server 2010 now features new archiving capabilities that combine with other enhanced mailbox management features, including advanced, multi-mailbox search, legal hold and granular retention polices to provide a comprehensive solution. Easy-to-use and deploy, this built-in functionality helps organizations reduce reliance on separate archiving solutions and simplify legal and compliance processes.

Functional Descriptions

Personal Archive: is an additional mailbox associated with a user's primary mailbox. It appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook. In this way, the user has direct access to e-mail within the archive just as they would their primary mailbox. Users can drag and drop PST files into the Personal Archive, for easier online access – and more efficient discovery by the organization. Mail items from the primary archive can also be offloaded to the Personal Archive automatically, using Retention Polices, reducing the size and improving the performance of the primary mailbox. In addition, users can search both their Personal Archive and primary mailbox simultaneously using Outlook.

Retention policies: enable application of retention settings to specific items or folders in a mailbox. Policies are configured by the Exchange Administrator and are displayed inside each e-mail, along with a header stating the applied policy and delete date. These headers make it easier for the end user to identify when an e-mail is set for expiration and apply a new expiration policy if the e-mail needs to be retained for a longer period. Administrators can set also default policy that can move messages from the primary mailbox to the Archive automatically.

Multi-Mailbox Search: enables multi-mailbox searches of mailbox items, including e-mail, attachments, calendar items, tasks and contacts as well as IRM-protected files. Multi-mailbox search works simultaneously across both primary mailboxes and Personal Archives with an easy-to-use control panel. This enables authorized HR, legal, and compliance users to perform searches without reliance on IT. For legal discovery purposes, mail located through search can be copied and moved to a specified mailbox or external store, as defined by the administrator for further investigation. Advanced filtering capabilities include: sender, receiver, expiry policy, message size, sent/receive date, cc/bcc, and regular expressions.

Legal Hold: enables immediate preservation of a user's deleted and edited mailbox items (e-mail, appointments, tasks, etc.) from both their primary mailbox and Personal Archive. Litigation Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise and also includes an option that automatically alerts users that a hold has been placed on their mailbox.

Note:

Alternative/archive mailbox can be used either with OWA or Outlook 2010 (but not with legacy Outlook clients).

Beta version of Outlook 2010 is not yet released for testing.
In Exchange 2010 Beta1, module is not ported in OWA to access Archive mailbox but it is available in later build as told.

So we need to wait for next Exchange 2010 public build...