Changing retention category and provisioning

[Carl_Swanson]

I need a little help. I have a conflict in what Symantec Support has told me and what the following thread stated and what I'm seeing

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/change-retention-category-existing-archives-retroactive

I had a retention category with forever retention and there were many users targeted. Those users now have been broken into other groups of retention(10,7,5,2 year) Mostly two year.  What I had done was create multiple new Retention categories and re-provisioned and have recently taken that Forever rentention category and set it to 2 years. I was told by support that setting that down to 2 years would only affect those provisioned to that category. Unfortuantley I have a feeling it's affecting all former users that were in that retention category.

Support gave me these two options and I chose number 2 but I'm seeing more expirations than I think I should be. 

1. Restore all the archived e-mails for the users who have been changed to different retention category and re-archive the same data which will take effect of the new retention category.

2. Move the users back to the retention category forever which means changing the provisioning group as well.

[WiTSend]

Retention is tied to the archived item at the time of archiving and cannot (easily) be changed.  Moving users to different policies/retention categories does not change the retention catgory of the archived objects.  Changing the properties of the retention category (i.e. time) affects all items with that retention category.

If it were me, I would:

1.  Change the time of the original retention category back to a longer time (preferably not "forever").

2. Create polices that I want and put the users in the appropriate groups for these policies.  Items archived from that point forward would follow the new policies.

3.  Accept the fact that the originally archived items will live a bit longer than I would like.

4. (optional) You can also create either a Managed Folder in Exchange, or a folder in the Mailbox with EVPM, give it the 2 year retention category and allow users to move shortcuts to that folder.  These items would then change to the new retention category of 2 years.

[Carl_Swanson]

Ugh. Ok. next question then. is there a way to mass delete from an vault without using retention. what if set something at the exchange level and purge the shortcuts past 2 years. wouth those items also be removed from vault archive?

Could I use DA to search and delete items?

[WiTSend]

Depending on your policy settings.  If you allow deletes from the archive you could do a search and delete from a specific archive. There is not a way to manually delete items across the entire vault store.  

Again, depending on your settings, if you allow deletion of shortcuts to delete the items in the archive as well it is possible to set up some search/delete in Exchange.

Is the amount of data being deleted worth the effort.  Sometimes its a cost/risk evaluation compared to the level of effort.

[Carl_Swanson]

Unfortunately it is worth the effort in some minds....over my head :) Good to know though I can just purge the shortcuts which will help alot.

The issue was when we originally set it up back in '06 we had a dept head request his entire group for an indefinite retention so it was set to that dept's OU level so nobody would be missed if an new account was created and now those users have been broken up into different retention and moved to different categories and that was about a year or so ago but ALL those previous items are tagged indefinite....

-Thanks

[AndrewB]

carl, did you get this sorted out?