Now that Exchange 2010 is officially with us, many admins are asking us what the real differences are and is it worth upgrading. The simple answer is, there are way too many little changes to mention. But over the coming weeks I’ll try and cover the big ones that might be worth shouting about.

Email is, as we all know, vital! – This means that as businesses we are starting to look at things like archiving of email, retention policies, indexing of the emails so we can get them out of the archive faster and with less administrative overhead. To be honest, it won’t be long before basic levels of archiving become legislative for Limited companies and we are forced to deal with the issue.

Exchange 2010 introduces a previously missing area of functionality called personal archives. These are available seamlessly within outlook on the desktop and also in OWA (Outlook Web Access) or Outlook Web App as it is now known.

Retention policies are introduced to allow for automated archiving, deletion and retention of email. A new?Legal Hold feature that saves any deleted or edited email for compliance and archive reasons.

Archiving Feature - Easily enabled from the management console

Here is a quick key archiving features rundown:

1. The Personal Archive.

A special mailbox associated with a users primary mailbox. This appears next to the user?mailbox in Outlook and Outlook Web Access for ease of use and direct access just like their own mailbox. Email from the primary mailbox (or another opened .PST file) can be dragged into the archive manually or placed in the archive through the use of retention policies specified by the admin (or a combination of both of course).

2. Legal Hold

New features in Exchange 2010 allow you to immediately preserve users edited or deleted emails, appointments or even tasks from their primary mailbox or the archive. This can be set globally for the Exchange system or individually on specific mailboxes and can be set for up to 90 days of hold. Think of this as a more advanced version of deleted item?retention with an audit trail.

3. Retention Policies

Retention policies are configured by the administrator and allow for specific items, conversation or even specific folders within a mailbox to be retained or deleted as required. 2 types of policy are included, delete policies and retention policies. Policies are used primarily for configuring when information is moved from the primary mailbox to the archive.

More soon…