Exchange 2010 Adds Archiving and Retention Features

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.