Enterprise Vault - Legal Hold

[KG]

We implemented Enterprise Vault for Exchange (v6 service pack 4) a couple years ago but did not license Discovery Accelerator.  What is the best way to handle "Legal Hold" requests on a user basis? 

Example:  User A has a 1 year retention and already has several messages archived at the 1yr limit.  Our Legal department sends a request to place User A on a legal hold so NO messages are deleted from their mailbox.  Changing the retention period is not an option as several users at set at 1yr.  With only EV installed, Symantec said the only way to change retention on User A's current and future messages would be to change the user to a "Forever" retention.  However, this requires the messages that have already been archived at the 1yr status to be restored and then re-archived so they accept the "forever" retention.

There has to be an easier way to do this.  Would Discovery Accelerator help in this scenario?  The goal would be to place User A on a Legal Hold so ALL messages are safe from being deleted.  Once the Legal Hold can be removed, then the legal hold will be removed and the 1yr retention will still be applied.

Thanks for the help.

[Jason_Szeto]

There's no easy way to do this without DA. With DA you could create a case and put items within that case on legal hold. Basically any search items found in that case can be put on legal hold.

As for within EV itself, once an item has been archived it has that retentetion category and there's no way to change it without exporting and rearchiving that item. You could technically change the property of the retention category to keep items forever but that would apply to all users with that retention category.

Another option would be to make sure storage expiry does not run and remove the delete permissions from the site settings and that way nothing should get deleted. Again this option will apply to all users.

[KG]

Thanks Jason!

That is exactly what I needed to know.  With DA can I create a case and place "ALL" e-mail message from a user into this case so that NO previous or new messages are removed until the legal hold has been lifted?  This of couse would be done without changing the retention and disabling the expiry job.

[Jason_Szeto]

With DA what you would have to do is create the case, make sure put items on legal hold is checked off and then create a scheduled search to run daily searching for items from or to that user you need to put on legal hold.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

Do you mean to make sure that Legal Hold is checked On so that Legal Hold is enabled, right?