Archiving hidden users

[Andy_Lukens]

As part of our termination process, users are hidden from the Global Address List and moved to a 'Term' OU.  I have created a more aggressive mailbox policy to be applied to these terminated users and applied it via a provisioning group.  When reviewing the provisioning report, the new policy is being applied as expected.

However, I'm running into a problem in that items aren't being archived from these terminated users mailboxes per the new policy.  In fact, if I run the archiving task in report mode, the mailboxes don't show up at all.  I have tried removing the 'Hide from Exchange address lists' checkbox, manually synchronizing and letting it sit over the weekend, but the mailboxes still don't show up in the report.  The mailboxes also aren't found if I try to manually start archiving on a single mailbox.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[andra_christie · Accepted solution]

A mailbox that is not listed in the Global Address List, will not be listed in the window Select the mailboxes that are to be enabled of the Enable mailboxes for Archiving wizard.

Hidden mailboxes are not visible in the GAL and, by default, they cannot be archived.

To change this default behavior 2 steps are necessary:
1.) Create and set to 1 the 'ProcessHiddenMailboxes' registry key on the Enterprise Vault server.
2.) Change to 0 the value of MbxExchangeState of every hidden mailbox record in the table ExchangeMailboxEntry in the EnterpriseVaultDirectory of the Microsoft SQL Server.


1.) Create and set to 1 the 'ProcessHiddenMailboxes' registry key on the Enterprise Vault server

a.) In the Enterprise Vault server launch the Registry Editor and navigate to:

HKLM\Software\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents

b.) Right click Agents, click New, select and click DWORD Value, and rename the default name with: ProcessHiddenMailboxes

Right click the ProcessHiddenMailboxes value and in Value data: type 1

c.) Close the Registry Editor and restart the Mailbox Archiving Tasks (in EV 5: Mailbox Archiving Services).

2.) Change to 0 the value of MbxExchangeState of every hidden mailbox record

a.) In the Microsoft SQL Server launch the Query Analyzer, write and execute the following query:

USE EnterpriseVaultDirectory
UPDATE ExchangeMailboxEntry
SET MbxExchangeState = '0' WHERE MbxExchangeState = '2'

b.) Restart the Enterprise Vault Administration Console.


After completing both the 2 steps, the hidden mailboxes should be listed in the window Select the mailboxes that are to be enabled of the Enable mailboxes for Archiving wizard, and ready to be enabled for archiving.


Every time the Synchronization process is executed, the MbxExchangeState value of all the hidden mailbox records is changed back to "2".
For this reason the hidden mailboxes will not be listed in the Select the mailboxes that are to be enabled window anymore.
It will be necessary to re-execute query as described in step 2.

By default, the Synchronization process is executed daily at midday and midnight.

[Andy_Lukens]

Thank you, I'll give this a try.

[Eric_Hodges]

Thanks for the post; I did this and it worked well. One note is that if you've got Enterprise Vault installed on Windows Server 2008 64-bit, then the registry key location is HKLM\Software\WOW6432Node\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents