Next to database availability groups (DAGs), the Personal Archive feature is probably the most dramatic architectural addition to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. On the Exchange Server 2010 Architecture Poster—which you'll receive a free, full-size, full-color copy of in the March 2011 issue of Windows IT Pro, thanks to the Exchange team—you can find Personal Archives described in the Mailbox Server Role box in the lower left.
Continuing this series of interviews about Exchange 2010 architecture, I discussed the Personal Archive feature with Ankur Kothari, a senior product manager with Exchange. We also talked about related features, such as email retention policies and the mailbox search capabilities for e-discovery that are built in to Exchange 2010. And don't forget to check out the previous interviews about Exchange ActiveSync and Exchange Online:
BKW: How did the Personal Archive feature come about as part of the Exchange 2010 development?
Ankur: So, it really comes down to the volume of email that people have started to receive. Organizations that we talked to say that they have a huge demand to preserve and discover that information. Every day it's becoming more and more critical. So when we designed Exchange's archiving capabilities, in both Exchange Server 2010 as well as Exchange Online with Office 365, we set about creating email archiving, retention, discovery capabilities that are built in to the product. We wanted to make sure that it was native in the product and that it would not change your user paradigm. It wouldn't change how your users work; it wouldn't change how your administrators work. If users are used to using Outlook or Outlook Web App, they would continue to be able to use it in a way that they were very familiar with. And so [the Personal Archive] shows up in Outlook, in Outlook 2010, in Outlook 2007, as well as Outlook Web App for Exchange 2010.
I also want to talk a little bit about retention policies. We have a lot of rich retention-management policies so that organizations can automate archival and deletion of email. Instead of having an individual user spending an hour every day managing their quota and moving items between folders, you can send an automated policy to manage all of that behavior and basically give that time back to your users. Finally, we also have a legal hold capability that allows some real rich compliance capabilities, including editing or deleting emails. So if you place someone on a legal hold as an IT professional, or even as a compliance officer, all of those changes and updates that an email goes through—if someone tries to intentionally modify the headers or whatnot—all of that is tracked. If there ever is a discovery request, all of that information can be discovered.
Speaking of those compliance officers, we had a number of requests from organizations, when we started designing [these archiving and compliance features], to say that they don't want to teach legal officers and compliance officers new ways of doing tasks: "We don't want them logging on to servers and running administrative consoles." So when we designed the UI for the compliance officers, we said let's expand the Outlook Web App experience so a specialist user like that compliance officer can use their email platform to do the e-discovery request across all the different message types and search as needed across the primary and archive mailbox. That's kind of the background of how we designed it.
BKW: With the release of Exchange Server 2010 SP1, the archiving feature received quite a few changes. Can you talk a little about those changes and why they came about?
Ankur: Absolutely. The first feature that comes to mind is due almost directly to customer demand. When we introduced Exchange 2010, the initial released product, we forced organizations to have their primary mailbox and their archive mailbox in the same database. That was to preserve the same end-user experience. If an end user was clicking in their Inbox and then switching to their archive, they would have the same speed of response, they would have the same benefits—it would appear as a very uniform experience.
Our customers came back to us and told us that they like to have different tiers of experience for their archive and for their primary mailbox. We listened to them, and we basically expanded the architecture to support having the archive on different storage. So you can have your archive on cheap disks, and you can have your primary mailbox be on higher-speed storage—have a more enterprise-capable primary mailbox while your archive is on slightly slower storage. It's feedback we heard over and over again, and so we decided that, hey, if there is that demand, let's absolutely put it in. It's what customers want, so let's move forward with that.
The second thing we announced with Exchange 2010 SP1, we enabled the capability to have your archive in the cloud. So if you're on Exchange 2010 SP1, you want to have your primary mailbox on-premises, and you want to have your archives kept in the Office 365 data centers, it's now enabled with the SP1 release. That really gives customers some value in not managing that historical data, that massive beast of data that exists for most organizations. Just offload that data to Microsoft to handle in our data centers.
BKW: Is that a feature that can be used only with Office 365 or can it be used with other types of cloud storage or hosted services?
Ankur: Great question. It is a feature right now that you can use with Office 365, which is in beta. And we have a number of partners that are actually expanding their hosted services to include that as well. Unfortunately, I can't name anyone right now.