Archiving and disconnected mailboxes

[JayScovill]

Can anyone tell me if mailboxes in a disconnected state in Exchange are still archived?  We disable mailboxes as part of our employee termination and put their user account in a group that has an archiving policy to archive all contents of their mailbox.

It would make life easy if the disconnected mailboxes are still archiveable so they can just be removed from the Exchange server after our retention policy expires.

Thanks

[Peter_Kozak]

Hi Jay,

you can set a registry key for ev to connect to a disabled user account. Not sure if that works as well for a disconnected Mailbox.

Probably you should test our new "ArchiveLeavers" tool (which is free).

When the tool is called to run against a specified mailbox the tool will connect to the mailbox, archive all non-archived items, remove them, and then delete all existing shortcuts. The end result is that you will have an empty mailbox.
 

ArchiveLeavers should be online for download later this week...

Please have a look on: http://www.quadrotech-it.com/products/evtools/free/

Peter

[WiTSend]

We have found that if we delay "disabling" the mailbox in our "leavers" workflow that we have time for our Leavers provisioning group to capture and archive all the data.  But, the tool mentioned above may be a great alternative.

[JayScovill]

I'm in the process of developing Orchestrator runbooks for these processes so they can be as automated as possible.  I was hoping that disconnected mailboxes could be archived so I wouldn't have to figure out how to build a delay relative to runbook execution time so the mailboxes have time to be archived before they are actually disconnected/removed.

This tool may help in that regard.

Thanks

[Ameen]

As far as I know there steps to archive a mailbox which is disconnected. What you can do is,

1.  create special OU in AD

2. move these users to this particular OU.

3. create a policy only for these OU with 'Archiving Rules' tab set as 'Archive Items when they are older than '0' days'. Make sure that all message classes are selected and 'Archive Deleted Item' is set 'On'.

4. Create a new Provisioning Group with target as the OU which is created in 1st step and set the policy created in 3rd step as mailbox policy for this new Provisioning group.

5. Right click in the 'Provisioning Group' and go to properties and change the Rank on new provisioning Group to 1.

Hope this will help.

[Dead-Data]

Has anyone got a quick bulk method to achieve archiving Exchange 2003 mailboxes where associated AD accounts have been deleted? 

Thanks in advance.

David

[Dushan_Gomez]

Hi Peter,

remove them, and then delete all existing shortcuts. The end result is that you will have an empty mailbox.

Then after that how can I browse the content of the leavers ? can I still export the mailbox as Outlook .PST file ?

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

You would then search the archive as all the items would be in it.

Yes, you can export an Archive to a .pst file.