2 Messaging Records Management
Messaging Records
Management (MRM) policies in Exchange Server 2010 are comparable to
rules in an Outlook client. With these policies, an Exchange
Administrator has the ability to automate the processing of email and
simplify message retention. Examples of reasons for implementing MRM
rules are things like: your company needs to comply with requirements
from Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), or the US Patriot Act.
With Messaging Records Management it is possible to:
One way to implement MRM is by
using "Managed Folders," which involves an Exchange Administrator
creating one or more custom folders and an associated custom folder
policy. This policy can be responsible for, as an example, messages
being deleted after 180 or 360 days, but the user is still responsible
for moving the individual messages to the custom folder.
NOTE
Managed
Folders and an Archive Mailbox are not compatible. If you are using
Managed Folders on a particular mailbox and you want to create an
Archive, the creation will fail:
You have to migrate the Managed Folder solution to a Retention Policy solution before implementing an Archive Mailbox.
New in Exchange
Server 2010 is the implementation of MRM using "Retention Policies" and
"Retention Tags." Retention Tags specify if retention is enabled, how
long a message (which can be a note or a contact as well) should be
retained, and what action will be performed when the retention age is
reached. Messages are processed by the Exchange Mailbox Server based on
the retention tags and those tags' content settings. When a message
reaches the retention age limit specified in the tag, it can be
archived, deleted, or flagged for user attention.
Using Retention Policies, it is
now also possible to store only messages with a maximum age of 3 months
in the user's mailbox, and store messages older than 3 months in the
Archive Mailbox. Suppose there's a Human Resources department within
your organization, and all messages older than 3 months should be stored
into the user's Archive. The following steps have to be followed:
Create the necessary
Retention Tags which define when an action should be taken (i.e. when
the retention time of 3 months have passed).
Create the Retention Policy that defines what needs to be done when the retention time has passed (i.e. move to the Archive).
Apply the policy to the mailbox.
Creating the Retention Tags and the Retention Policy cannot be done with the Exchange Management Console, only
with the Exchange Management Shell. You'll need to open the Management
Shell and enter the following command to create the Retention Tag:
When the tag is created, the results will be shown immediately:
[Edited for readability]
The next step is to create the actual policy that defines what RetentionTags are included with this policy:
Again the results will be shown immediately:
[Edited for readability]
Now the policy with the retention
tags needs to be applied to the user's mailbox, in our example, Katy
Price from the HR department, and the Managed Folder Assistant needs to
be started. To do this, enter the following commands:
When the Managed
Folder Assistant has finished applying the policy, you can check the
mailbox and its archive. For the user "Katy Price" in our example, the
mailbox has shrunk from 1.5 GB to "only" 430 MB. The remaining 1.1 GB of
mail data has been moved to the archive.
The Managed Folder Assistant
is running on the Mailbox Server where the user's mailbox resides. To
change the schedule when the Managed Folder Assistant runs, open the
properties of the Mailbox Server in the Exchange Management Console and
go to the Messaging Records Management tab. Be careful when you schedule
the Folder Assistant to run, especially when a lot of mailboxes are
initially managed, and a lot of data needs to be moved.
In that situation, the Managed Folder Assistant will consume quite a lot of resources very quickly.
When creating the
Retention Policy Tag using the New-RetentionPolicyTag, the
–RetentionAction parameter defines what action needs to be taken when
the policy comes into play (In our example, the "MoveToArchive" was
selected). The following options are available for the –RetentionAction
parameter:
move to archive
move to the Deleted Items folder
delete and allow recovery
permanently delete
mark as past retention limit.
Whether the tag applies to the
entire mailbox or a specified default folder is determined by the tag's
Type property. You can create default policy tags of the following
types:
All
Calendar
Contacts
DeletedItems
Drafts
Inbox
JunkMail
Journal
Notes
Outbox
SentItems
Tasks
RssSubscriptions
SyncIssues
ConversationHistory
