Microsoft Product Roadmaps

ShareTweet

Written by Rob Sanfilippo

Exchange Server 2010, available now as a release candidate with general availability planned for Nov. 2009, adds new features to help organizations archive data such as e-mail and voice mail messages, calendar items, and contacts. It also adds capabilities to address the growing need for businesses to comply with corporate, government, and legal policies affecting messaging data retention. Organizations have mostly had to rely on ISVs or hosted service solutions that work with Exchange Server for archiving and retention, so the inclusion of the new features with Exchange 2010 could reduce the risk of organizational noncompliance, but may impact these partners.

Archiving, Compliance Features Previously Sparse

Previous versions of Exchange addressed archiving and item retention with various server and client-side features, but Microsoft has not offered a coordinated suite of tools to cover organizational needs in these areas. The Outlook client has long offered an auto-archiving feature that moves items of a specified age out of a user's server-based mailbox into an external personal folders file (PST), often located on the user's hard disk. This feature helps users stay within their server mailbox size limits while retaining old items, but IT departments can lose control over and access to this messaging data when it's moved to client disks and users may not always have access to their archive PST if they log on from different places. Worse, locally archived data may be stored on portable computers or media that can get lost or stolen, causing a risk of revealing confidential data.

Exchange 2007 introduced a journaling feature that could make copies of messages traveling through Hub Transport servers and store those copies for review in a separate mailbox or forward them to a SharePoint site or SMTP address. Journaling can be enabled for specific recipients (such as a distribution list or a single user). In addition, Exchange 2007 offered a new retention feature called Messaging Records Management (MRM). MRM's single subfeature in Exchange 2007 was called Managed Folders, which uses administrator-defined rules to delete or move messages in several mailbox default folders, such as Inbox, Sent Items, and Deleted Items, as well as administrator-defined custom folders. Managed Folders gives administrators some retention control over users' messaging data, but it depends on users to place and keep items in the appropriate folders in order for the correct policy to be enforced.

Personal Archive Centralizes Control and Access

Exchange 2010 adds the Personal Archive mailbox, a secondary mailbox that can be enabled at a per-user level. The main benefits of the Personal Archive are better administrative control over users' personal backups of messaging data, centralized archive access for users, and possible reduced storage requirements compared with PSTs.

The Personal Archive appears as a separate set of folders from the main mailbox in Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App (OWA) 2010 clients (other clients do not expose the feature). Users can use the secondary mailbox as they had previously used an archive PST (and existing items in PSTs can be moved into the Personal Archive), but since the Personal Archive is server-based, it allows administrators to maintain control over it so it can be backed up, retained per policy, and searched when necessary, and allows users to access their archives from any PC with a server connection. The Personal Archive has separate quota limits from the primary mailbox, although both must be stored in the same mailbox database on the Exchange server.

Administrators can configure Outlook to prevent the use of PSTs, so after switching an organization to server-based Personal Archives, administrators could turn off the ability to use local archive PSTs and ensure all archiving is done on the server. Since Exchange Server uses single instance storage, the server-based archives can reduce overall storage requirements. For example, if 10 users on the same mailbox database archive the same message with a large attachment, only one copy is stored on the server, but if each user archived the message locally, 10 times the storage would be used. However, IT departments will need to supply and maintain additional Exchange server disk storage to accommodate server-based archives.

Retention Tags Manage Messaging Data

Exchange 2010 adds Retention Tags to manage how messaging data is retained, which could help organizations with compliance.

A Retention Tag is metadata that is attached to an e-mail message or mailbox folder and specifies how long items remain in their current folder and what happens to them when that time elapses. For example, upon expiration an item could be moved to the Personal Archive or to the Deleted Items folder, deleted with recovery allowed, permanently deleted, or marked as past its retention limit to notify the user to take action on the item. A single Retention Tag can be applied to each mailbox folder and item, and different tags would typically be used for items from different departments such as human resources and engineering, or for items of correspondence with different external partners. A tag on an item overrides the tag of its containing folder, and a default tag on the mailbox is used when neither the item nor the folder it is in has an associated tag.

Administrators enable a mailbox for Retention Tagging by assigning it a Retention Policy, which lists the mailbox's default tag, specific folder tags, and personal tags. The personal tags become available in the client, where users can assign them to folders and items. A header in a message item's window displays the tag that is in effect for that item.

Retention Tags and Managed Folders are both categorized under the MRM feature, although Managed Folders remains in Exchange 2010 only for backward compatibility and cannot be used on the same mailbox with Retention Tags. Retention Tagging provides per-item tagging; Managed Folders does not. Retention Tagging can be used on e-mail message items anywhere in a mailbox, whereas Managed Folders only controls a mailbox's default folders and additional custom folders created by administrators, but not folders created by users. Also, Managed Folders does not support moving items to the new Personal Archive. Therefore, Retention Tagging relies less on users to move items to the correct folders than Managed Folders and gives users more flexibility in assigning retention behavior to their e-mail. However, Retention Tagging cannot be used on calendar, contact, journal, note, and task items, and it can only be used with Outlook 2010 clients, whereas Managed Folders works with Outlook 2007 as well.

Oddly, neither Retention Tagging nor Managed Folders integrate with Exchange's Message Classification feature, which is used to alert recipients of message sensitivity and trigger Exchange Transport Rules. (For more information on Message Classifications, see the sidebar, "Exchange Message Classifications.")

Although Exchange 2010 editions and licensing have not yet been announced, it's likely that Retention Tagging will be available only with the Enterprise CAL, like Managed Folders in Exchange 2007.

Cross-Mailbox Search, Legal Hold Assist Investigations

Exchange 2010 adds a new Web-based user interface called the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), which lets delegated personnel perform tasks such as performing cross-mailbox searches and creating new mailboxes, which previously required Exchange administrator tools, like the IT-oriented Exchange Management Shell, to execute. Cross-mailbox searches may be necessary for legal or internal investigations or for locating critical items lost from one mailbox that may still exist in other mailboxes.

The ECP lets authorized users perform searches on mail, calendar, task, and contact items, including attachments and items encrypted with Microsoft's Information Rights Management (IRM) technology. Items located by a search can be moved to a separate mailbox for retention and further review. The ECP and its support for delegation could lessen the burden on IT personnel to perform multi-mailbox searches.

Legal Hold is a new feature that preserves all items in administrator-specified mailboxes. Legal Hold overrides all other retention policies and can be used when an organization is notified of impending litigation and has an immediate need to preserve all current and ongoing messaging communications. Under Legal Hold, users can still access and manage their mailboxes, but item deletions and modifications are held in the mailbox's Recoverable Items folder in an area that is hidden from the user.

Some Assembly Required

The new archiving and retention features in Exchange 2010 provide organizations with tools that overlap current software and hosted services, including Microsoft's own Exchange Hosted Archive service, as well as solutions from partners. However, appropriate use of the new features will still require careful information archiving and retention planning and deployment, and a successful implementation will require legal and organizational policy expertise, so there will probably still be a demand for third-party solutions and services to supplement Exchange 2010 in the archiving and compliance areas. Additionally, although e-mail is a primary concern for archiving and retention, data used within an organization's other applications and services may require equal attention, so the Exchange tools are likely to be one part of an organizational strategy.

Exchange 2010's new archiving and retention features may be enough to attract customers of Exchange 2003 that bypassed Exchange 2007 to upgrade, although Exchange 2007 customers with stable archiving and retention practices already deployed may be harder to convince to make a renewed investment.

Resources

Information on Exchange 2010, including a link to download the release candidate, is at www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010.

Prerelease Exchange 2010 documentation is at the TechNet site technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124558(EXCHG.140).aspx.

For a preview of Exchange 2010, see "Exchange 2010 Release Candidate Available" on page 8 of the Sept. 2009 Update.

For a discussion of new High Availability features in Exchange 2010, see "Exchange 2010 Bolsters High Availability" on page 13 of the Oct. 2009 Update.

For a full overview of Exchange 2007, see the Mar. 2007 Research Report, "Evaluating Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007."