Planning Archiving Strategy with Mailbox Archiving

So often it is easy and of course important for Administrators to be planning the aspects of a new implemntation in respect of the sizing factors of an install, what they need to ingest perhaps in terms of PST's and how the product will be rolled out, the archiving strategy and some of the finer points of configuration are lost.

Results are six months later the Enterprise Vault Administrator has settings in place that are not fitting to his organization, resulting in warnings in the Enterprise Vault Event Logs, data incorrectly deleted, shortcuts removed incorrectly, archiving not taking place correctly the list goes on and on. Get it right first time and think about each aspect.

The prodcut is huge and highly configurable, however there are some things that once done cannot be easily undone or changed. So here is a check list of what you need to think about to get it right first time and have a long period of happy archiving. ;-)

Strategy

Age versus quota versus age and quota(version 8 only). How long before archiving should take place? Think carefully about this. Do you really want to archive data after a week, or three/six months. Be sensible, why archive user data too soon if users are going to be accessing it regularly etc. What percentage would you keep below quota? If your archiving strategy has to be so servere, due to Exchange resources than perhaps it would be sensible to address the Exchange organization resources. The idea of Enterprise Vault is not to replace storage for Exchange bur rather work with it, too often this point can be missed.

There is also the user side to consider. Are users to be given access to Archive Now, Restore functionality? Are users going to be able to overide archiving settings if the full client is used?

What message classes do you require to be archived? For example are using perhaps using some specific software that delivers fax data to user's maiulboxes and has a differewnt message class?

How much data are you going to leave behind in a shortcut? Remeber the more data left behind the larger the Mailbox will become.

Retention Categories

Retention categories are very important in terms of how long you want data to be retained. What are the legal requirements for your organization? Do you want to apply different Retention Categories to different folders using EVPM before archiving takes place? Remember though you can alter a Retention Category from say five to ten years you cannot apply a newly created one to data already archived.

Storage Deletion

You may want to think about how you manage deletion in regards old data. How soon do you want the data deleted. Are users to be allowed deletion from their own archive? How long do you want data to be retained after user deletion? Default is fourteen days.

Always take care with deletion, once it is gone, it is gone and the only solution is either disaster recovery or using perhaps tools like EVSVR (only available in version 8) which is time consuming and resource intensive. Not too mention usually involves unhappyh users.

Vault Cache/Offline Vault

How do you want Vault Cache/offline vault configured if you are going to utilize this. Do you want to taget certain groups and if so are you going to allow these groups to enable Vault Cache/Offline Vault themselves or if this going to be automatically enabled for them? How much data do you configure to be available offline? 1GB or 20% of the archive size? Is the default location where you would like Vault Cache data to be held?

Shortcut Deletion

Shortcut deletion can be very important especially when using quota based archiving. Do you want shortcuts removed after a certain time period leaving the users the option to search for data, or view via Archive Explorer, thus keeping mailbox size to a minimum? Once the shortcuts are deleted remeber the only way to retreive these would be from backup.

Indexing

What Indexing level do user's require? Look at the various levels and decise what best fits your organization. Getting this wrong can be fixed, but is very labour intensive as you would need to rebuld all indexes.