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.

Continue reading Exchange SP1 won’t trash your important stuff

Microsoft has whet the appetites of administrators this month by announcing some the new features it expects to be in the first major upgrade of its Exchange Server 2010 software later this year. Here are 30 of the new features in the upcoming Service Pack 1 for the program. They allow an administrator to:

1. Provision a user’s Personal Archive to a mailbox database other than the one used by its primary mailbox. That gives an organization more flexibility for creating storage strategies for less frequently accessed email.
2. Import historical email data from .PST files directly into Exchange.
3. Delegate access privileges to a user’s Personal Archive by an administrator.
4. Create Retention Policy Tags. The tags allow an administrator to automate the deletion and archiving of email  and other items.
5. View a preview of a search. One area where that would be handy is in compiling information to comply with electronic discovery requests from lawyers and regulators. It allows an organization to estimate the number of items from a search, as well as display keyword statistics, before the items are copied to a designated discovery mailbox.
6. De-duplicate email sent to the discovery mailbox so multiple copies of messages aren’t sent there. That can reduce the amount of mail that needs to be reviewed after performing the search.
7. Annotate items in the discovery mailbox to improve workflow of the process.
8. Access the Personal Archive of users of Outlook 2007.
9. Work faster with the Outlook Web App (OWA). A pre-fetch function speeds up the reading experience. Delete, mark as read and categorize tasks run asynchronously greatly speeding up the user’s experience. Performance crippling tasks, like attaching large files to emails, are handled in a way to keep them from slowing down a user’s interaction with the OWA interface.
10. Improve experience of netbook users by eliminating clutter in the Outlook Web App interface.
11. Share calendars created in OWA with anonymous viewers on the Web, provided the activity is approved by an administrator.
12. Create documents in OWA protected by Information Rights Management (IRM) that can be viewed in browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer.
13. Customize the look and feel of OWA through the use of “themes,” as well as move the application’s reading pane around.
14. Create IRM protected email on mobile phones connected to an organization’s network through Exchange Active Sync (EAS). EAS is Microsoft’s synchronization protocol that allows mobile phone users to access their email, calendar, contacts and tasks from Exchange servers. Currently mobile phone users need to connect to Windows Mobile Device Center to provision IRM.
15. Enable “send-as” permissions through EAS.
16. Receive notifications through EAS that a user’s device has been blocked or quarantined by an administrator.
17. Implement fully the conversation view of messages with EAS.
18. Synchronize portions of messages with EAS.
19. Facilitate setting up mobile devices to access POP/IMAP/SMTP by including the server names for those services in Outlook Web Access program.
20. Create or reconfigure Retention Tags and Retention Policies through the Exchange Management Console (EMC).
21. Configure Database Availability Group (DAG) IP addresses and an Alternate Witness Server in the EMC. Currently, if an administrator wants to do something like use one or more static IP addresses for a DAG,  they have to go outside the EMC to do it. Similarly, only a DAG’s witness server and directory can be configured from the EMC.  To configure an alternate witness server, an administrator needs to do so outside the EMC.
22. Manage the recursive public folder settings through the EMC.
23. Configure litigation holds on mailboxes through both the EMC and the Exchange Control Panel (ECP).
24. Configure transport rules in the ECP.
25. Configure the journal rules in the ECP.
26. Configure MailTips in the ECP.
27. Configure and provision the Personal Archive in the ECP.
28. Configure in the ECP policies for allowing, blocking or quarantining mobile devices.
29. Manage Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in the ECP. RBAC replaces the permissions model used in Exchange 2007. It gives administrators great latitude in defining permission models based on the roles of the people on their network.
30. Control the connection behavior for Outlook when databases change Active Directory sites as a result of a cross-site switchover or failover. The administrator can choose between preventing all cross-site connections, or alternatively, allow Exchange to connect cross-site from a client access server in one site to a mailbox server in another site for temporary cross-site situations.

Microsoft will be hedging its bets before the official rollout of the upgrade. It plans to release a beta version of SP1 at TechEd North America in June.