Exchange 2010 archiving – what every IT pro wants to know about it

Last week during TechEd Europe, Exchange 2010 officially launched. At the conference among a lot of topics on Exchange was a Q&A session hosted by Kamal Janardhan, Principal Lead Program Manager on the Exchange team at Microsoft.

During the session, a lot was clarified on the topic of the new archiving feature in E2010. In this article I'll try to summarize the most important things.

The archiving feature, just introduced in Exchange 2010 had - in my opinion - a few loose ends that still needed tying up. That or I just didn't understand the whole purpose of the feature J

Actually MSFT has a top three wish list of features that they want to have ASAP, being:

• Accessing your archive from a Outlook 2007 client
• Storing the archive in a separate mailbox database
• Importing PST files to a users archive

Especially the second feature surprised when I first heard that it wasn't possible. The news here, on all three features, is that they are planning to have them ready in the next big Exchange update (that being probably SP1, release date ~ 1 year after RTM)

The original idea behind the archiving was to have only the most frequently used data available. Most frequently being 2 years, which several studies mention as the time for data being access frequently. By adding an archive after 2 years (the default policy) the load on the Exchange server would be reduced.

The archive would only be available when connected to the Exchange server. Same idea. That and the mails from the last 2 years would be available offline via the ost file. The same situation that you now have when synching your smart phone.

Placing the Archiving mailboxes on a separate database is what we all want (just like e.g. Enterprise Vault does this) so we can place them on cheaper storage. MSFT's vision is that with Exchange 2010 you can have your databases on cheap SATA disks without RAID (or even JBOD). I will elaborate on this subject in a later blog post.
Archiving to a separate database will be available in the next update for Exchange 2010.

A few features on archiving:

• End user search will also work for the archive
• It will not be possible to have multiple archive mailboxes per user. The reason that people had multiple PST files was probably due to the 2 Gig size limit anyway
• The retention policies for the mailboxes can be configure via a GPO
• The dumpster size can be configured (using Power Shell)
• In the RTM version of Exchange 2010, delegates by default have no rights on the Archive mailbox. These can be set. It is likely that this will change in the next update
• The retention policy will work with the date received date and timestamp of the message.
• Accessing the archive mailbox from your smart phone is technically possible but currently not implemented.
• It is possible to have a retention policy based on message class (e.g. mail, contacts, calendar etc.)