Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of mattguil
mattguil

asked on

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 - Retention Policies, Backup and Archive

Experts -

I'm surprised to discover how difficult (or non-straightforward) it has been to located useful information regarding mailfile retention policies specifically related to Exchange Server 2007.  A couple questions:

1.  After transitioning from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, is there a place within the Exchange Mgmt Console I may look to discover any sort of default retention policy being applied to my Exchange organization?

2.  Does anyone have any helpful info regarding the configuration of these retention policies?

3.  What is your favorite (tested and approved) Exchange 2007-specific backup and archive solution?

Background:  we are preparing to implement Mimosa Nearpoint for Exchange to archive all mail items, and I would like to ensure nothing is being removed from the system at this time.  We want to keep everything and simply stick it in a big archive.  We're a smaller organization that is willing to invest in storage in an effort to retain any business related information that touches the messaging system.

From a backup perspective, so far it seems Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager DPM is the system I'm looking for.  I'm looking for one piece of software that can backup Exchange, Virtual Machines, AD, Sharepoint, Network File Data, and the eventual Mimosa Archive Server (or similar)

Thanks again for your time -
Matt

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of leakim971
leakim971
Flag of Guadeloupe image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
At Org Level Mailbox Role go to the Managed Default Folders tab. Right click on the folder you want a policy on and select New managed Content Settings. Create the policy as you'd like it.

Now go to the Managed Mailbox Policies tab and create a new policy and add the managed folders you modified above.

You can now apply the Managed Mailbox Policy to users in Mailbox Setting/Mailbox records mangement.

Go a bit further and you can create your own "specail folders" with different policies that exist outside of the default folders. We use this for records retention and train the users about using them. Here again, you'd add these new policies to the Managed Mailbox Policies so they are added to the mailboxes

As far as backups, I am with leakim971, DPM works great but still requires a lot of work to restore. Hopefully in V3 (2010) we will be able to do item level restores without restore groups..


.
Avatar of mattguil
mattguil

ASKER

Great information.  Thank you.

I'll get to work and respond with feedback in a few.  Cheers-
Thanks for your work demazter!
Happy to help :-)