Exchange 2010 Holes
Using Exchange 2010 as an archive is a bad strategy.
Archiving in Exchange 2010 is not adequate for compliance
The main new feature of Exchange 2010 is the ability for each user to have a secondary mailbox containing the user’s archive. This archive is accessed through Outlook 2010 or the latest version of Exchange’s Web client. For branding reasons, the Web browser client in Exchange 2010 has been renamed Outlook Web App. Browsing the archive is just like browsing a regular Outlook mailbox: You navigate a hierarchy of nested folders. The archiving works with any Exchange content, including email, tasks, contacts, calendar meetings, and notes. Office Communications Server (OCS) instant messages are also supported. Unlike many third party archiving systems, it is not just an email archive, although clearly for most people the email archive will be the most important element. It’s striking that archiving is a seamless extension of Exchange and Outlook. As you would expect with a built-in capability, few new concepts are introduced. Users and administrators rely on familiar interfaces, minimizing the learning curve for deploying the new services.
Value of archiving with a third party tool
Exchange 2010 archiving will not replace third-party archiving tools. It’s more accurate to view third-party archiving solutions as Exchange enhancements. For the foreseeable future, they will continue to have a synergistic relationship with Exchange rather than a competitive one.
More Complex Policies - The structure and meanings of rules for Move to Archive, Keep for, and legal holds are rudimentary and will be insufficient for many compliance policies. For example, users who do little foldering probably have very large Inbox and Sent folders and might want to deploy the following rules: Move to archive if Subject line contains “archive” or if To/From address contains a competitor’s domain name and keep for 7 years if email To or From address is in the Finance distribution list and if the body or attachment contains “annual report” or “annual return.”
Policies Can Be Enforced - IT defines the available retention policies and can define default Move to Archive and Keep for policies. In principle, IT can impose policy by defining default archive and retention polices, and then not providing any additional policies. In practice, however, users will often be able to apply alternative policies and thus will have the power to decide what to archive and how long to keep such material. For many regulations, this is inappropriate. Third-party solutions can help ensure that policies can be formulated by central compliance staff and automatically enforced without giving users the ability to disobey the policy. When auditors and investigators search an archive, they must be able to have confidence in their results.
