More and more companies are finding themselves in the crosshairs of lawyers filing lawsuits against them. That’s become a concern for electronic information managers because the first thing those legal beagles want to sniff is a company’s data stores. That means anything stashed on your Exchange servers is fair game for them. Previous versions of Exchange were weak in preserving data to meet the “discovery” demands generated by lawyers or regulators. Microsoft has changed that, though, with Exchange 2010.

With the arrival of that version of Exchange, administrators at last have a way to preserve documents  that might be needed to fulfill legal obligations imposed on them by outside forces. Placing a hold on a mailbox preserves a user’s deleted and edited items, including email messages, calendar entries and tasks. The hold applies to both the user’s primary mailbox and archive mailbox.

In the RTM version of Exchange 2010, the only way to implement a litigation hold was through the software’s shell structure with a statement like Set-Mailbox -identity “Name” -LitigationHoldEnabled $true. With the arrival of the SP1 beta of the application, though, holds can be created through the Management Console or Control Panel.

To set up a hold using the Console, you go to a mailbox recipient’s configuration and right click on the mailbox to access its properties. From the properties screen, you drill down to the properties settings for the Messaging Records Management item. There you can activate your hold by checking the box beside Enable Litigation Hold. You can also add a URL for a web page describing your organization’s policy governing holds, as well as any comments you may want users to see when they access their mailboxes after a hold has been imposed on them.

In Exchange Control Panel, you go to Manage My Organization, click Users & Groups and Mailboxes and choose the user you want to slap the hold on. From the screen that appears next, click Details. That will display a screen of options about the mailbox. One of them will be Mailbox Features. When you expand that item, you’ll see Litigation Hold listed. By selecting it and clicking enable, the hold will be implemented. As with Console, you’ll be able to add a URL to your organization’s retention policies and a note for the mailbox’s user.

Of course, since nothing is being deleted when a litigation hold is placed on a mailbox, email bloat is inevitable. For example, the storage requirements for a user who sends and receives 100 messages a day could balloon to 1.4GB in a year. That could have posed a problem with the RTM version of Exchange because a user’s personal archive had to be stored in the same database as his or her primary mailbox. That’s not necessary with SP1, though. The archive can be stored in a separate database or even in the cloud.

That addresses the location problem, but what about the size problem? With Exchange’s support of large mailboxes–up to 100 databases per Exchange 2010 server and up to 2TB of storage per database–that shouldn’t cause a fuss.

Data placed on litigation hold is stashed in the Recoverable Items Folder. That folder replaces the Dumpster scheme used in older versions of the software. Although items appeared in Dumpster, they were never actually moved from their native locations. That “view” approach had to be scrapped when Microsoft got serious about litigation holds. Hence, Dumpster gave way to the Recoverable Items Folder.

Ordinarily, the Recoverable Items Folder has limits on its size by default–30GB, with a warning at 20GB. That limitation is designed to foil denial-of-service attacks that place large amounts of data in the folder to bring network activity to a crawl. However, legal hold items aren’t subject to those limitations so it’s important to monitor the space on  drives that contain databases with legal hold mailboxes.

Before Microsoft bolstered Exchange’s legal hold features, organizations had to resort to third-party software to meet those needs. Will those features reduce the demand for that kind of software? “I think the jury is still out on this,” Brian Posey wrote for SearchExchange.com.

“Exchange Server 2010 hasn’t been available long enough to know for certain how well the Legal Hold feature will work in real-world situations,” he continued. “However, I’m willing to bet that larger organizations may still need third-party software.”