With the expanded role of email in business communication, there is a need for organizations to preserve emails for compliance and security reasons. Email has become the lifeblood of companies, the primary means by which employees communicate with clients, coworkers and vendors. Since electronic messages contain business related data or content, emails often maintain importance that extends months or years into the future. Additionally, many times an Email administrator will be faced with the task of gathering and producing messages for legal cases. For these reasons, message Archiving is a vital process.
Lets examine some of the evidence for considering Exchange Archives over other solutions.
Exhibit A: The Archive is a secondary mailbox in Outlook
The Archive mailbox is a secondary mailbox that appears in Outlook beneath a user’s Primary mailbox. Archive Retention policies on the Exchange server are configured to move messages from the Primary mailbox into the Archive once the messages reach a certain age. For the end-user, this is a seamless process. Additionally, the archived messages are stored in the same folder hierarchy in which they resided in the Primary mailbox. For users, it’s a benefit to have a consistent view between the two mailboxes. However, there isn’t a process in place to synchronize the Primary and Archive mailbox folder structures. If a folder is deleted or moved in the Primary mailbox, the same actions are not applied to the corresponding folder in the Archive mailbox. This can lead to some divergence between the two folder structures.
Exhibit B: No third-party utility needed for management
This article will not explain the steps involved in creating Retention polices and Archive mailboxes. But will only highlight the advantages they provide towards managing them. For Exchange administrators, Archive mailboxes are managed using the Exchange Management shell or console. The Archive mailbox can be created via the shell or console. As with Primary mailboxes, limits can be placed on Archive mailboxes or the databases that contain them. If limits are placed on both, the mailbox settings will override limits that are configured at the database level. Also, the Retention policies that determine when and what items are Archived are setup in the console.
Exhibit C: Can leverage native Exchange HA solutions
The databases that hold Archive mailboxes are not different from the databases that contain Primary mailboxes. As a matter of fact, both types of mailboxes can reside on the same database. For this reason, Archive mailboxes are able to be included in a DAG and replicated. Some organizations may require Archives to be available in database *over scenarios.
Exhibit D: No Stubbed messages
Due to the fact that messages are not transferred to a separate database with Exchange Archives, there are no linked messages that point to the actual email. This is particularly important for compliance reasons. Most organizations have compliance standards that mandate emails are retained and produced for legal cases. When messages get archived with 3rd Party solutions, important meta data gets removed. This can render the message incomplete and not reflective of its original state when collected for discovery procedures.
Conclusion
Upon looking at the evidence, it can be stated that Exchange Personal archives in most cases is a better choice: seamless integration, access to native high availability, no linked messages, Of course, all situations aren’t equal and in some cases a 3rd party solution could be more viable. Each organization will have to evaluate its particular needs and challenges, and make a decision accordingly in regards to an archiving solution.
DaRaw Techie 