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.

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