Thankfully, the days of PST files are over. You know, those pesky little Archive folders scattered in hidden locations on your laptop, desktop and terminal server profile?

Microsoft Exchange 2010 includes a new (and great) feature, called online archive, which enables you to provision your mailbox-enabled users with a familiar personal archive, available online, providing you with a lot of features to preserve and discover e-mail data.

Personal Archive is a specialized mailbox associated with a user’s primary mailbox. It appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App, giving users direct access to archived email in the same way as non-archived email. For example, users can search both their Personal Archive and primary mailbox using Outlook or Outlook Web App. Email items from the primary mailbox can be automatically offloaded to the Personal Archive through retention polices, and administrators can also import historical email data from .PST files directly into Exchange. With the flexibility to provision a user’s Personal Archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox; organizations can more easily implement separate storage strategies for less frequently accessed email.

Retention polices can be used to apply settings to specific items, conversations or folders in a mailbox. Policies are configured by the Exchange administrator and are displayed in Outlook 2010 inside each email along with a header stating the applied policy and delete date. There are two types of policies available to users: delete policies and archive policies. Both types of policies can be combined on the same item or folder. For example, an email can be tagged so that it is automatically moved to the Personal Archive in 15 days and deleted within 45 days. Administrators can also use archive policies to control when messages are automatically moved from a primary mailbox to the Personal Archive.

In addition, Legal Hold enables the preservation of a user’s edited and deleted mailbox items (email, appointments, tasks, etc.) from both their primary mailbox and Personal Archive. Legal Hold can be set on individual mailboxes or across the enterprise. They can also be set for a specific time period (for example, place a mailbox on hold for 90 days). In addition, Legal Hold includes an option that automatically alerts users through Outlook 2010 that a hold has been placed on their mailbox.

Want more information? Give us a call and we can discuss how to move your organization to Exchange 2010.

by Michael Perkins, President at Data Network Group.