ShortCut Deletion

[Veritas_Resolve]

Hi Guys,

This one must be simple, however need your expert advise.

In my org. we are about the delete shortcuts older than 2 years. 

Can someone please tell me its benifites?

As, how it will benifite Exchange, EV and the users? Can storage space be considered in it?

i got around 200,000 users and we are using EV from past 10 years.

Thanks in advance.

[Ben_Watts · Accepted solution]

The basic benefit will be making the end users mailboxes smaller, other benefits will be slightly fast archiving runs too as EV will no longer need to check these items during the Archiving runs.

Each shortcut is around 4k so deleting 8 years of shortcuts from 200,000 mailboxes is a fair lump of Exchange Storage to reclaim.

Users will benefit from smaller mailboxes, smaller caches if you run in cached mode.

The only issue is they will need to search for any old emails via EV Search or Archive Explorer.

I would recommend deleting them in stages though, dont go for the full eight years worth of shortcuts to be deleted from all mailboxes in one hit.

Delete any shortcuts older than 9 years, then 8years, then 7years etc, as each run will place a load on the Exchange Servers, best to have it running under load than over load.

[GertjanA]

all points agree with Ben, especially the granular delete!

From experience, you will have to make sure your users understand they need to use the search to find items older than 2 years. There sometimes is confusion with users, clarify that when the shortcut in the mailbox is removed, this does NOT mean the item is gone from the archive.

Out of curiosity, which EV version are you running? Have you enabled 'update moved shortcuts'? If not, make sure your users understand items in the archive might be in another location in the archive as where they expect it to be.

If on EV11, enable them for the new search! That will assist in getting used to finding items quickly.

[Veritas_Resolve]

Thank you Ben & Thank you GertjanA for your valuable inputs.

@GertjanA: we are using EV10.0.4.