Managed Folders

[ChrisGardner]

Exchange 2007

EV 8

I have setup Manged Folders in Exchange 2007 and a retention policy for each manged folder.  I see the retention policies in the Retention Category in the Vault Admin Console.

Currently we archive the user's Inbox after the email is 2 years old, I have managed folders with 6 months and 1 year retention policies (also 5 year and 10 year).  Does the email get archived when it is moved into the managed folder or how do I set archive rules on a managed folder (use EVPM?)

Chris

[JesusWept3]

The only thing Managed Folders should be changing is the retention category i believe? could be completely wrong, but it should archive the item based on the policy and if it chooses to take the managed folders retention, it should keep it for as long as the retention is stated

So if you have EV respect MF's rules, it will archive it and keep the same retention, so if its a 30 day retention on the folder, EV could very well take the same retention and then delete the email out of the archive after 30 days when the Storage Expiry runs

[ChrisGardner]

Thats what I was thinking, but if I have a managed folder with a 6 month policy setup in Exchange Manged Folder and our default archive on EV is 2 years, does that mean emails in the 6 month managed folder with a 6 month retention policy applied will get archived and expired at the same time?

For example: With my 5 year managed folder, I would expect to see archived email at 2 years and then expire according to the 5 year retention policy.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

OK So you Exchange Managed Folders in EV has three settings


1. Off
If Enterprise Vault encounters an Exchange Managed Folder it will ignore the folder and not archive any items within that folder itself

2. Normal
This is the default setting and the folder will be treated the same as any other folder within the users mailbox, so it will give it the same retention categories as another folder

3. Managed
Enterprise Vault will read, copy and respect the Retention set on the managed folder

What this means is that, say you have the following

\Inbox\My Folder <-- Unmanaged
\Inbox\Other Folder <--- Managed

Lets say you have a default retention policy of three years on the inbox and you have your Managed Folders set to something like 30 days (as is the case with "Other Folder"), when Enterprise Vault archives items within that folder, if you have the policy set to "Managed" then it will take that retention of 30 days and apply it to all messages within that folder itself.

So that when storage expiry runs, it will delete any items from that folder with that managed retention category and then delete them after 30 days


Remember that Managed Folders have taken the place of Exchange Mailbox Manager that existed in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003.....

What companies used to do is put on a quota, lets say 200mb, and then use Mailbox Manager to remove items that are older than 60 days or some such, so that they can keep the mailbox small, encourage users to delete the items or move it off of the exchange server to PST's etc

However in Exchange 2007 onwards, that capability went away, so people started using Exchange Managed Folders, so they could tell the mailbox to delete items after 30 or 60 days or what not.

This is good if you want a catch all expiry on the mailbox, so whether its archived, a message, a sticky note, whatever it is, you can delete it and keep the mailbox small

In this scenario you would NOT want to let EV respect the Managed Folders settings, you would want to treat it as normal, so that EV can archive the items correctly, and that it will remain in the archive for however long you want it to (say three years, seven years etc) and that the Exchange teams can expire items out of the mailboxes and keep them smaller etc

However on the flip side there is the other use case scenario, where Exchange teams will set up retention folders and apply a Managed Folder policy against it , such as

\1 Year\
\3 Years\
\7 Years\

This way they can keep basic compliance, people can put their items in to the respective folders and know that the items will remain in their mailbox, and then this way Enterprise Vault can just sync across the information and keep those items for however long the folder states.

Another upside to this as well is that Exchange teams can create retention folders at will for each user and not have to involve the EV Team and running EVPM scripts, and another advantage on top of that is that you don't have to worry about having large complex EVPM Scripts that keep needing to be re-run against old and new users in case of someone zapping the mailboxes and removing the hidden messages etc