Deleting mail older than...

w^rl0rd

I'm looking to cut down mailboxes in my environment to storing only 90 days of email.
I've done some research and found out about "Managed Content Settings" which sounds
like what I'm looking for. However, in some of the articles I read, "Managed Folder Mailbox Policies" were being used as well.

I'm confused because from what I can gather, the Managed Folder Mailbox Policies are only used to put custom folders in certain users' mailboxes. What if I just want to trim mailboxes down to holding mail within a specified amount of days? Do I still need a Managed Folder Mailbox Policy?

LarryDaMan

w^rl0rd wrote:

I'm looking to cut down mailboxes in my environment to storing only 90 days of email.
I've done some research and found out about "Managed Content Settings" which sounds
like what I'm looking for. However, in some of the articles I read, "Managed Folder Mailbox Policies" were being used as well.

I'm confused because from what I can gather, the Managed Folder Mailbox Policies are only used to put custom folders in certain users' mailboxes. What if I just want to trim mailboxes down to holding mail within a specified amount of days? Do I still need a Managed Folder Mailbox Policy?

I will say be real careful and check the policies and regulations instead of making the decision by yourself. Depending on the industry for which you work, legislation has been passed since 9/11 that requires e-mail to be kept for varying amounts of time. You may even have to store it for even longer after removing from the production system.

They don't make it easy to find, but do some research and determine what rules govern your workplace. You don't want to be THAT guy!

w^rl0rd

larrydaman wrote:

I will say be real careful and check the policies and regulations instead of making the decision by yourself. Depending on the industry for which you work, legislation has been passed since 9/11 that requires e-mail to be kept for varying amounts of time. You may even have to store it for even longer after removing from the production system.

They don't make it easy to find, but do some research and determine what rules govern your workplace. You don't want to be THAT guy!

I hear that. I'm letting the big guys make that decision. I just have to implement it.
Our company has decided on 90 days. Right now I'm setting up a test environment
so I can avoid being THAT guy.

royal

I wish that Microsoft would implement some API for archiving vendors to implement so Microsoft can allow you to not have MRM delete items without them either being backed up or archived first.

HeroPsycho

Symantec Enterprise Vault can do that already without MRM. They have an option of safety copies that guarantees EV won't remove any item from a mailbox until that item is committed to EV, and then verified to have been backed up within there. Very cool. If you ask me, EV is the only way to archive!

You still need a policy in this case to say that items over than 90 days will be deleted.

There's the notion in Exchange 2007 of a custom folder and a default folder when you're talking about MRM policies. In this case, you need to specify a policy to apply to the inbox default folder.

royal

Ah that's cool. Have you worked with Quest Archive Manager at all? I've been looking at some archiving products that allow PST imports.

Quest provides 3 different tools for this:
1. PST Importer
2. PST Compacter
3. PST Merge

Basically, PST Compacter and Importer work together. Compacter takes PST files from users computers and puts them on a file server with XML data so you can import those PSTs and create archived mailboxes out of them.

PST Merge takes those PSTs and merges them into their Exchange inbox and removes the PSTs and modifies the registry to prevent them from using PSTs anymore (same thing GPO would do).

Are you familiar with EV tools that can do similar functionality?

astorrs

royal wrote:

Are you familiar with EV tools that can do similar functionality?

With Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Exchange PST Migrator is what you're looking for.

royal

My company offered to send me to EV training but I got too busy for it and declined. I regret that. I'm going to try to get an NFR copy and learn it myself.

HeroPsycho

The only other archiving solution I'd consider over EV would be Mimosa, simply because the architecture of it is superior for Exchange performance considerations since it effectively does log shipping instead of adding additional transactions and relying on journaling to capture all messages.

However, it's more expensive than EV, and EV is expensive enough as is.

FYI, EV can also provide mobile users Offline Vault, too. Way cool...

astorrs

royal wrote:

My company offered to send me to EV training but I got too busy for it and declined. I regret that. I'm going to try to get an NFR copy and learn it myself.

That's too bad, it's a great product - nothing else (that I know of) can integrate vaulting for so many different apps out of the box. If you guys are Symantec partners it shouldn't be too hard to get an NFR or a really long eval period. There are some eLearning courses available (or at least there used to be) if that's your kind of thing also.

astorrs

HeroPsycho wrote:

However, it's more expensive than EV, and EV is expensive enough as is.

More expensive, dear god...

bertieb

astorrs wrote:

That's too bad, it's a great product - nothing else (that I know of) can integrate vaulting for so many different apps out of the box.

Yeah I agree. We are beginning to use Commvault with a plan to integrate the Data Archiver engine at some point, but it's not something you can use easily out of the box plus I'd hazard a guess that it'd cost even more than EV - got a spare kidney to sell?

blargoe

+1 on EV, it rocks! Just make sure you get the design right the FIRST time, or you will have a big headache down the road.

royal wrote:

My company offered to send me to EV training but I got too busy for it and declined. I regret that. I'm going to try to get an NFR copy and learn it myself.

If you can get the training, please consider it. It can be a complicated product to implement. In our case, in lieu of the training our Symantec rep sent us an engineer onsite to help design the infrastructure and go over in depth all of the things we needed to know. I finally did go to the training. I'd suggest doing one or the other.

HeroPsycho

bertieb wrote:

Yeah I agree. We are beginning to use Commvault with a plan to integrate the Data Archiver engine at some point, but it's not something you can use easily out of the box plus I'd hazard a guess that it'd cost even more than EV - got a spare kidney to sell?

That's the thing about archiving products. Choose wisely because changing to something else later will suck beyond belief.

royal

Ya, I've heard EV is quite complicated as well. *scared*

blargoe

Do you have an ISA server royal? We designed our archiving solution when we were running Exchange 2003 everywhere. We didn't need to have access to archives remotely until we started to upgrade to Exchange 2007, and there isn't a supported way to securely remote access the archives in 2007 OWA without externally publishing it in ISA. We haven't implemented ISA yet, so you can imagine that promising functionality and then not being able to deliver has turned on the pressure a smidge.

royal

blargoe wrote:

Do you have an ISA server royal? We designed our archiving solution when we were running Exchange 2003 everywhere. We didn't need to have access to archives remotely until we started to upgrade to Exchange 2007, and there isn't a supported way to securely remote access the archives in 2007 OWA without externally publishing it in ISA. We haven't implemented ISA yet, so you can imagine that promising functionality and then not being able to deliver has turned on the pressure a smidge.

I've done quite a bit with ISA.

Check out this article I wrote about publishing EV via ISA 2006. My client was battling with EV to get this working and ended up calling EV and talking to one of their ISA guys who worked with EV and they worked together to get this working. So my client sent me the ISA rules and explained to me what had to be done and I posted about it.

http://www.shudnow.net/2008/06/24/publishing-symantec-enterprise-vault-in-isa-2006/

This documentation isn't anywhere in the EV documentation and the documentation for publsihing EV with ISA is garbage and essentially says, "You can publish EV with ISA. Need more info? Check the Microsoft Site." It doesn't go into the steps required on how to actually publish it.

As for Outlook Anywhere, there will probably have to be additional rules created and I haven't played with that nor has the client.

astorrs

royal wrote:

Check out this article I wrote about publishing EV via ISA 2006. My client was battling with EV to get this working and ended up calling EV and talking to one of their ISA guys who worked with EV and they worked together to get this working. So my client sent me the ISA rules and explained to me what had to be done and I posted about it.

http://www.shudnow.net/2008/06/24/publishing-symantec-enterprise-vault-in-isa-2006/

This documentation isn't anywhere in the EV documentation and the documentation for publsihing EV with ISA is garbage and essentially says, "You can publish EV with ISA. Need more info? Check the Microsoft Site." It doesn't go into the steps required on how to actually publish it.

Thanks for the link royal, that might come in handy down the road.

blargoe

I think from an external perspective it shouldn't be that different than with OWA