In this multi-part article I want to introduce you to Exchange 2010 SP1 Archiving. Because the archiving mechanism changed heavily in the transition from Exchange 2010 RTM to Exchange 2010 SP1, this article assumes SP1 for Exchange 2010 is installed.

Introduction

Exchange 2010 SP1 has the following archiving possibilities:

• Legal Hold: Stores all incoming and outgoing messages into an archive. Legal Hold can be enabled on a per-user basis. This form of archiving is mostly used for legal purposes.
• Retention: Takes care of archiving messages that meet certain criteria. These criteria can be set by an administrator or by the user if tags are enabled in the environment. This form of archiving is mostly used to store certain messages on slower (cheaper) storage.

Legal hold will be discussed in a future article. For now I want to focus on retention.

How retention works

In Exchange 2010 SP1, archiving is based on tags. There are a few ways to implement archiving based on retention:

 

• Using a company wide policy (Default Policy Tag)
• Using policies set on default folders like the inbox (Retention Policy Tags)
• Enable users to use “tags” to classify their own messages (Personal Tags)

The above mentioned tags are configured and grouped by creating a “retention policy”. There can be multiple retention policies in an environment, but users can only be member of 1 retention policy.

A user can access the archive by using Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web App. The archive is shown as an addition to the users normal mailbox:

Prepare the environment

In this first article, I’ll explain how to configure your environment and user mailboxes for archiving.

1. Create the archive mailbox store

At first, a mailbox store is needed to store the actual archive mailboxes. Archive mailboxes can exist on the same mailbox database as the normal mailboxes, but personally I don’t see any reason to do so since the number one reason to implement archiving is “freeing up space on our expensive disks”.

So, create a new mailbox database on your attached storagedevice by firing up the Exchange Management Console, navigate to Organization Configuration, Mailbox and click “New Mailbox Database” in the action pane. Name the database and change the database path to the location on your “cheap” (SATA) storage.

2. Configure the Managed Folder Assistant

In an Exchange environment, the managed folder assistant is the process that checks messages in users mailboxes for compliancy with the attached retention policy. If this is not the case, the managed folder assistant moves the messages that are candidate for archiving to the archive mailbox. The managed folder assistant is configured with a so-called “Managed Folder Work Cycle”. This cycle sets the amount of time the assistant should run on every mailbox. For example, when set to 1 day, the managed folder assistant will run daily on all mailboxes on the specified mailbox server. When set to 7 days, the process will check every mailbox once in 7 days.

Configure the managed folder assistant as follows:

Set-MailboxServer MyMailboxServer -ManagedFolderWorkCycle 1

3. Create the archive mailbox for users

3a. Using the Exchange Management Console (EMC):

• Start the EMC
• Navigate to Recepient Configuration, Mailbox
• Select the users which will be given an archive mailbox
• Select “Enable Archive” in the action pane

Select “Create a local Archive” and select “Select a specific mailbox database rather than having one selected automatically”

• Browse for the appropriate mailbox database.
• Select OK

3b. Using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):

Enable-Mailbox -Identity UserName -Archive -ArchiveDatabase ArchiveDB

4. Start the Managed Folder Assistant

After creating user mailboxes, the Managed Folder Assistant needs to be started. To start the managed folder assistant for all available mailboxes on a server, run the following command in the EMS:

Get-Mailbox -Server Mailboxserver1 | Start-ManagedFolderAssistant

5. Optional – Set a quota on archive mailboxes

Like on a normal mailbox, an archive mailbox can also be effected by a quota. This has to be set on the actual mailbox. With a archive mailbox, the quota can not be set at a global level on the mailbox database.

Using the EMC:

• Start the EMC
• Navigate to Recepient Configuration, Mailbox
• Select the users which will get the archive quota, choose properties
• Select the Mailbox Settings tab
• Select Archive Quota
• Adjust the Quota

Using the EMS:

Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox –ArchiveQuota 1000MB – ArchiveWarningQuota 500MB

6. Optional – Disable the archive mailbox to participate in automatic provisioning

In Exchange 2010, every mailbox participates in an automatic provisioning mechanism for new mailboxes that are created. This way, mailboxes are evenly divided between mailbox databases. Ofcourse, you don’t want your archive mailbox database (which is on slower storage) to participate in this process. Use the following command to exclude the database from this mechanism:

Set-MailboxDatabase -Identity "ArchiveDB" -IsExcludedFromProvisioning $true

A word on archive mailbox management

In some environments, the administrator has access to mailboxes of users, for example for administrative purposes. An administrator which holds the “full access” permission on a user mailbox, automatically has the right to open the users archive mailbox. To open a users archive mailbox, open Outlook 2010 and add the users normal mailbox, the archive mailbox will also appear. Please note that this is only possible with Outlook 2010. This feature is not implemented in Outlook Web App.

In the next article a company wide archiving policy will be created.

Back to Exchange 2010 Archiving Guide Index.