WHITE PAPER

Addressing E-mail Archiving and Discovery

with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010

Introduction
With businesses generating and sharing an ever-increasing volume of information
through e-mail, the ability to protect and preserve these critical communications is
essential. Whether your motivation is to improve storage management, meet
regulatory requirements for data retention, or lower the costs of conducting
electronic discovery (e-Discovery), implementing an effective e-mail archiving and
discovery solution can offer a number of benefits.

Even though there are clear-cut drivers for adopting such solutions, a significant
number of organizations rely instead on potentially less efficient means to store and
search these enormous amounts of data. For example, when users have small
mailbox quotas, they often archive older messages into local Microsoft® Outlook®
Data Files (.PST files), removing this important historical record from Exchange
Server. With these messages no longer under the direct control of your IT
department, it can be very challenging for your organization to comply with
regulations or respond in a timely fashion to e-Discovery requests.

To help you more effectively address these needs, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
introduces integrated e-mail archiving, retention, and discovery capabilities. These
built-in tools can help you simplify the process of preserving and discovering e-mail
without having to change the way your users or administrators work with and
manage Exchange Server.
The importance of archiving e-mail
From mitigating the risks associated with the annual double-digit percentage
increases in legal disputes to finding ways to reduce your storage costs, the
motivations for deploying a comprehensive solution for archiving e-mail are best
summarized as the following:

• Optimizing storage management to lower costs

• Complying with industry and regulatory data retention requirements
• Streamlining discovery processes to ease the burden of responding to legal
orders

Challenges with current approaches

While organizations strongly desire the real benefits of archiving e-mail, many have
faced complexity and challenges that have either stalled or prevented the
successful deployment of an adequate solution.

“PST files are quite a

First, e-mail can be stored in numerous locations across
nightmare for IT to
your network. E-mail can be found in .PST files, posted
manage. We look
to Microsoft SharePoint® sites, stored on backup tapes,
forward to Exchange
hosted on third-party solutions, or even forwarded by
2010 negating the need
your users to their personal e-mail accounts. With the
for supporting PSTs. It’s
potential of up to 90 percent of your e-mail residing
going to take a lot of
outside of your Exchange Server, it can be daunting to
headaches away for us.”
enforce data retention policies or locate relevant
– Ronald Loewenthal communications when compliance matters arise.
Customer Service
Additionally, many e-mail archiving approaches
Manager, Super Group
introduce an environment that is unfamiliar to both your
users and IT administrators. For instance, users often
need to leave the familiarity of Microsoft Outlook to
interact with their archived e-mail. They will likely need to learn new skills and client
applications to search or access archived messages. This can disrupt the normal
workflow for managing their inboxes. In many situations, e-mail is archived out of
Exchange and into separate data repositories, which could result in a loss of
features that boost user productivity—such as the new Conversation View or the
“anywhere access” benefits of Outlook Web App—that likely led you to choose
Exchange to begin with.

For your IT department, complexity can arise from having to deploy and maintain
Outlook and Outlook Web App add-ins to enable user access to archived e-mail.
When it comes to administrative tasks, there could be a range of challenges to
learning and implementing yet another infrastructure that needs to be as reliable
and easy to access as your Exchange Server. And, your IT staff may experience the

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added burden of having to utilize different methods to conduct mailbox searches
across recent e-mail in Exchange and messages archived to another repository—all
to perform queries on behalf of your organization’s compliance officers, legal
department, or human resources.

Lastly, there is cost. Not only do you need to deploy and operate a separate
infrastructure that runs in parallel to your business critical e-mail platform, you’ll
need to train your users and support increased help desk call volume as users learn
new tools for managing their e-mail. All of these can lead to higher operational costs
in a time when every business is seeking to transform IT into a competitive asset by
driving down the costs and overhead of infrastructure investments.

A different approach to e-mail archiving

Recognizing the importance of deploying an effective archiving and discovery
solution, Microsoft has delivered new, integrated e-mail archiving, retention, and
discovery capabilities with the release of Exchange Server 2010. These built-in
features (Figure 1) were designed with an appreciation for the potential barriers
that have limited wide scale adoption of e-mail archiving. They can help you
preserve and discover e-mail without having to alter either the user or IT
professional experience.

Figure 1: Integrated e-mail archiving features of Exchange Server 2010

Delivering a familiar experience

When organizations have small mailbox quotas in place, users spend valuable time
trying to stay below these limits by either deleting e-mail from their inboxes or
offloading it to their PCs in the form of .PST files. While .PST files provide an intuitive
user experience, their creation isolates this e-mail on individual desktops. As
highlighted previously, this can make it challenging for your organization to meet

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 industry and regulatory requirements around e-mail retention and timely e-
Discovery. For example, when a discovery request is made, .PST files must be
retrieved and searched manually—a potentially time-consuming and costly process.
Similarly, legal holds and message expiration policies cannot be enforced
consistently.

Through the introduction of a new, integrated Personal Archive in Exchange 2010,

e-mail currently stored in .PST files or other locations can be easily moved back to
the server.

The Personal Archive is a specialized, secondary Exchange mailbox that is uniquely

associated with a user’s primary mailbox. It offers your users an alternative storage
location for their historical e-mail, greatly reducing the need for and proliferation
of .PST files. E-mail items from a user’s primary mailbox can be automatically
offloaded to the Personal Archive through Retention Polices (see below).
Administrators also have the option to import historical e-mail from existing .PST
files† directly into Exchange.

Both you and your users will immediately benefit from having all of your
organization’s important e-mail back under IT department control. All of your e-mail
can be better protected thanks to built-in high availability features and policy
management, while your users gain the improved business mobility they often
demand.

When implemented in conjunction with the large mailbox investments made in

Exchange 20101, you can cost-effectively manage both current and archived e-mail
in a single platform. Specifically, Exchange 2010 enables you to take advantage of
high-capacity, low-cost disks. Combined with the significant IO savings and built-in
mailbox resiliency technologies delivered in this release, you now have more
choices at your disposal to meet your storage management requirements without
having to break your budget. You also have the flexibility to provision and manage
archive mailboxes on separate Exchange databases†, allowing you to implement
alternative storage strategies for less frequently accessed e-mail data.

Figure 2: A familiar experience with

Personal Archive appearing in
Outlook Web App

1 “The Microsoft Large Mailbox Vision” - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?

FamilyID=e3303d34-af6c-4108-861b-dc05f9cf3e76&displaylang=en

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 To help deliver a familiar user experience,
the Personal Archive appears alongside
primary mailbox folders in both Outlook2
and Outlook Web App (Figure 2). Just like
any other folder or opened .PST file, your
users can easily interact with archived e-
mail using existing skills. For example,
they can “drag and drop” e-mail
messages to their Personal Archive,
create folders, set flags, reply to
messages, and even conduct searches
across archived e-mail, all within Outlook
and Outlook Web App. This greatly reduces the
need for costly user training or additional support
resources when rolling out a new archiving
solution.

For your administrators, the same tools that they

use to manage other aspects of Exchange Server
—such as the Exchange Management Console or
PowerShell—can be used to configure and deploy the Personal Archive. This
includes tasks like setting separate storage quotas for the Personal Archive,
enabling delegate access to the archive†, and importing e-mail from existing .PST
files into Exchange†.

Flexible and granular retention policies

To help you meet a wide array of company, industry, or regulatory requirements,

Exchange 2010 includes an improved approach to managing message retention.
You can define and deploy Retention Policies (Figure 3) which automate the
deletion and archiving of e-mail and other Exchange item types.

Retention Policy Tags (Figure 4) can be created to apply retention settings to

default folders, such as the Inbox and Sent Items. Exchange then performs specified
retention actions once the item has reached its retention age. Actions can include
moving the message to the user’s Personal Archive, moving it to the Deleted Items
folder, or permanently deleting the item. You can allow users to assign personal
retention policies to individual messages, conversations, or custom folders to
ensure proper message expiry is set on important e-mail. This allows your users to
adapt e-mail retention and message classification to their individual work styles.

As items are moved from one folder to another, they can inherit any Retention
Policy Tags applied to the folders to which they moved. If an e-mail is moved to a

2 Requires Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2007†

Figure 3: Easily create and deploy
Retention Policies from the Exchange
5 Management Console†
folder that does not have a policy assigned, the default retention policy set by your
Exchange administrators will be applied to it. If the item has been tagged explicitly
by a user, this retention setting takes precedence over folder-level or default tags.
Outlook 2010 displays retention policy details right in the message preview pane.
This removes the need for your users to monitor a specific folder to learn which
messages may be expiring soon.

Retention policies work seamlessly across both the primary mailbox and Personal
Archive. Both types of policies (Delete and Move to archive) can be combined on
the same item or folder. For example, an e-mail can be tagged so that it is
automatically moved to the Personal Archive in ‘x’ days and then deleted within ‘y’
days.

Exchange 2010 also adds a new Legal Hold policy. Legal Hold enables the
preservation of any edits to or deletions of e-
Figure 4: Different Retention Policy Tag
mail made by the user placed on hold,
types available in Exchange Server
whether in their primary mailbox or Personal
2010
Archive. Altered messages are captured in a
recoverable items store within Exchange that is neither accessible to nor
changeable by the user.

Legal Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise and can be
set for a specific time period (for example, hold items for 90 days). Legal Hold also
includes an option that automatically alerts
users through Outlook 2010 that a hold has
been placed on their mailbox.

You can apply Retention Policies and Legal

Hold even if a user does not have a Personal
Archive provisioned. For example, your
organization may choose to simply deploy
large mailboxes without Personal Archives.
Legal Hold can still be used to preserve e-mail to comply with data retention
requirements.

Powerful multi-mailbox search

Exchange 2010 simplifies the e-Discovery process with a new, Web-based, easy-to-
use Multi-Mailbox Search feature. This capability can be delegated to specialist
users, such as compliance officers, who are normally tasked with conducting e-
Discovery for range of legal, regulatory, or personnel reasons. Thanks to the new
role-based security model of Exchange 2010 you can offload this burden confidently
without having to provide full administrative privileges.

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 Based on the content indexes created by the built-in
“We used to spend one Exchange Search, Multi-Mailbox Search provides rich,
or two days looking for keyword-based search criteria (using Advanced Query
information we needed Syntax) for an assortment of Exchange message types
for legal requirements. such as e-mail, calendar appointments, and instant
Now, with multi-mailbox messaging conversations. Exchange 2010 also indexes
search in Exchange a long list of attachment types as well as messages
Server 2010, we can protected using Information Rights Management (IRM).
find what we need in an
hour or less.” You can select a specific mailbox or mailboxes—even
distribution groups—as targets of the search. And, a
– Julio Sandoval single search query automatically includes relevant e-
mail found in a user’s primary mailbox, Personal
Head of Middleware,
Archive, and recoverable items store.
Binaria
A search preview† provides details on the estimated
number of results including keyword statistics to help
you conduct early case assessments or fine-tune search
criteria. Once satisfied with the search parameters, results can be copied to a
specialized mailbox specifically created for discovery purposes. A new folder is
created in the target mailbox for the search with subfolders for each user mailbox
containing relevant messages. These messages are copied to a folder that has the
same name and location as it appears in the original mailbox, preserving the folder
hierarchy. Optional de-duplication of search results† allows for copying of only one
instance of messages, and facilities right in Outlook Web App allow you to easily
annotate† reviewed items help make your e-Discovery workflow more efficient. The
result: you no longer need to export results to a .PST file and manually import them
into Outlook to review your search.

Lastly, Multi-Mailbox Search logging options allow you to capture information about
conducted searches. For instance, a comma separated value (CSV) file can be
created that contains details on the query, the mailboxes searched, all the items in
the search results, and attributes of these messages.

Third-party e-mail archiving solutions

While you’ll likely find that the built-in archiving and discovery capabilities in
Exchange 2010 meet your organization’s needs, we’ve also made it possible for
Microsoft independent software vendor partners to extend our archiving, retention,
and discovery feature set through scalable Web services interfaces. Microsoft is
working closely with a number of leading archiving and compliance solution
providers to deliver additional tools that build upon the functionality delivered in
Exchange 2010 to help you address specialized or industry-specific compliance or e-
Discovery needs. Most importantly, you will be able to preserve familiar user and IT

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professional experiences. For more information on partner solutions for Exchange
2010, visit microsoft.com/exchange.

Conclusions
There are likely many reasons your organization is seeking new and better ways to
preserve and discover the critical business communications conducted over e-mail.
Whether your motivation is to lower your storage costs, address regulatory
compliance, or meet time tables for legal discovery orders, the integrated e-mail
archiving, retention, and discovery features offered in Exchange 2010 can help your
organization:
• Deliver a seamless experience without interrupting your users’ e-mail
workflow.
• Streamline administrative tasks using familiar management tools and
delegation.
• Reduce costs and lower administrative overhead through integrated
capabilities.

†
Available with Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1)