Archiving/Purging problem - Microsoft Office Communicator Conversation History

[krismason]

Hi All,

Long time reader, first time poster here.

We use Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 which keeps conversation history in Outlook under Root Mailbox Level in a folder called Conversation History. To my knowledges these are MSG format messages (if I drag and drop one on the desktop it is of extension .msg)

At the moment we archive all messages that are of 3 months age (IPM.Note , IPM.Document and IPM.Post)

With our existing exchange policies these items are being archived, I have been asked to investigate the possibility of purging these items after a period of time.

Is it possible to have a policy that affects the same folder in every users mailbox? 

Any help would be most appreciated

Kris 

[TonySterling]

Hi ya,

What version of Exchange and EV are you using.

One option would be to use EVPM and apply a specific retention category to the items in that folder or even set the folder to Do Not Archive and use Exchange management tools to purge the folder after a period of time and keep them from going into the archive at all.

Regards,

Tony

[krismason]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for the response. We are using Exchange 2003 and Evault 8 SP4.

Yes I would prefer if they never went into the archive at all.

Sorry what is EVPM? Where do you set do not archive a specific folder is this done in EV? 

Thanks

Kris

[JesusWept3]

If you set the Top Of Information Store to Do Not Archive then you would need to set EVPM to archive all the subfolders you wish to actually archive.

So the first thing to check is are they actually IPM.Note or are they perhaps something like IPM.Note.Communicator or something similar? if they are then the first thing to do is add that to the message classes on the site level then make sure its excluded in the archiving policy.

Next step would be to start using Exchange Mailbox Manager to clean these messages up

Some references online seem to show that you can specify the message class that the conversation history saves to

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

Like JW2 said if they are a different message class you can exclude them by would be the easiest thing. 

Other than that using EVPM to exclude just that folder would work.  I would not set it on the Top of Information Store.  There is information about EVPM in the Utilities guide under the Policy Manager section.  An example script would look like this:

[Directory]
directorycomputername = myserver
sitename = mySite

[Mailbox]
distinguishedname = ALL

[Folder]
name = \Conversation History
filtername = DoNotArchive
 

[JesusWept3]

sorry i misread , didn't see that it was going to its own folder

agree with tony, set the DNA and then use EMM to get rid of the items after a time
 

[krismason]

ok thanks guys think im starting to get it ... 

From the example script you have knocked up for the ini file

I would

Identify my server

Identify my site

Select all mailboxes

Specify the conversation history folder

Then apply a filter to do not archive anything in this folder.

I would like to apply be able to say all of the above however instead of saying do not archive anything in this folder, delete anything that is older than say 30 days?

[TonySterling]

You cant use EV to delete the items in the folder, you would need to do that with Exchange Mailbox Manager.