It is easy for IT People to forget the long time-span that some businesses have to work to. It is not uncommon now to find Companies that are keeping, and referring to, emails that are at least fifteen years old. In fact, the IT Industry seems to be on the extreme low end when it comes to information retention; in few other industries does information age so quickly. Perhaps it is because email developed initially to serve the needs of IT that categorization, search, and retention of aged documents is so poorly thought out.

Ironically, Exchange is an expensive place to store your digital materials, mainly due to the fact that resources in attachments tend to be copied to a number of places, rather than being accessed by reference. The current work doesn’t cause the problem, so much as the cumulative effect of older emails and attachments that are only used occasionally, if at all.

Storage Teams, Exchange Admins and CIOs all seem to agree on the need to keep the Exchange database as light as possible. Doing so makes Exchange perform and scale better. If Exchange is kept light, then backups and replication are quicker and easier. As such, Exchange Administrators often see themselves as being engaged in a constant war against the hoarding instincts of the users, who want to be able to search and sort their old emails, and not have to worry about where to look for their data.

Although Exchange has many features that will help to archive older data, it doesn’t have everything that is required to solve the problem. Businesses want to minimize the use of PSTs while, at the same time, providing a virtually unlimited mailbox size. Managed Folders and Hub Transport rules are fine for ordering, blocking, enforcing policies, copying, and sorting, expiring or attaching headers to emails. Messaging Records Management is useful for compliance, data retention, and mailbox management. It will also let you set policies on the default Mailbox folders that will cause emails older than a certain age to be moved to a custom Managed Folder. However, none of this actually helps to solve the problem, because the emails that are retained are all still within Exchange’s database. This forced many exchange admins to implement a system whereby mail in the custom managed folder was deleted after a certain period, such as 150 days.

In truth, however, the facility to quickly access and search emails dating back decades is essential for many businesses, and, in certain cases, is required by law. Much of the current wave of new legislation on document retention arises from the gap between what was possible with the traditional filing systems, and what Exchange can provide; between what is required from efficient management of email, and what the proper conduct of businesses actually requires. This gap will only disappear with effective archiving of Emails outside Exchange that is so discreet that the end user doesn’t even need to notice that it is happening, and which fits in with the way that the user needs to work.

Cheers,

Michael Francis