Setting a retention policy on a folder
Default folders such as the Inbox or Sent Items probably come
under the control of a folder retention tag included in the retention
policy that’s applied to a mailbox. You cannot override the policy set
on default folders, but you can apply a different policy to
user-created folders by assigning a personal tag to the folder. All the
items that are held in the folder will then inherit the tag placed on
the folder unless they in turn are tagged with a different personal tag.
To
set a new policy for a folder by applying a personal tag using Outlook
2013, select the folder and click the Assign Policy icon on the
toolbar. Outlook then displays a list of the personal tags. Click one
of the tags to select it. Outlook puts a check mark beside the chosen
tag to indicate that it will apply this tag to the folder; the items in
the folder will inherit the tag from the folder. Another way of
accomplishing the task is to select the properties of a folder by
right-clicking the folder in the Outlook folder list and then choosing
to the Policy tab (Figure 14).
If
a policy tag is in force for the folder, it will be shown as the
current folder policy. If you attempt to apply a personal tag on a
default folder that is controlled by a retention policy, you won’t be
able to select a new personal tag to apply. If the folder policy is
listed as Use Parent Folder Policy, no specific personal tag has been
applied to the folder, and the MFA will apply the default retention tag
to the items in the folder. This is also the case for archive policies,
shown in the Online Archive area at the bottom of the screen, where you
can see that the folder uses the default archive tag.
You can
select any personal tag available to the mailbox through its assigned
retention policy and apply it to the folder. Outlook displays the
available personal tags in a drop-down list (Figure 14).
When selected, Outlook updates the retention data stored in the mailbox
(which makes the new policy visible to the user). In the background,
the MFA applies the policy to the folder and the items contained in the
folder the next time it processes the mailbox unless an explicit
personal tag has already been applied to an item in the folder, in
which case the existing tag is retained. To set a default policy on a
folder with Outlook Web App, select the folder from the folder list
under the Mailbox root, right-click to select Apply Policy, and then
select the personal tag to apply to the folder.
Removing tags from policies
You
remove a retention tag from a policy by selecting the policy in EAC and
editing the list of tags, removing the one you no longer use. When you
remove a tag like this, the MFA erases details of the tag from the
policy information that is held in user mailboxes. This action makes
the tag unavailable (invisible) to the user. If the tag is replaced by
another tag, like when the tag for a default folder is replaced by
another tag for the same folder, MFA applies the new tag to the folder
the next time it processes the mailbox.
However, if a personal
tag is removed from a policy, the MFA leaves the tag in place on
whatever items to which the tag has been applied and continues to
process the items according to the policy expressed with the
now-removed tag. This is because the tag is still a known object within
the Exchange configuration data, so the tag stays in effect until it is
replaced in some way, such as by a different personal tag being
applied. Despite the fact that the user can no longer apply this
personal tag to other items, it will be shown to the user if he views
an item to which the tag was applied when it was included in the policy.
If
you delete a tag, it is removed from Active Directory. The MFA cannot
process a nonexistent tag, so it has to search all mailboxes to
discover items that were stamped with the now-deleted tag and restamp
these items with whatever tag is now applicable, such as the default
tag. Searching a Mailbox server to locate and then process potentially
hundreds of thousands of items is obviously not good for server
performance, and this will happen across every Mailbox server in the
organization unless the deleted tag was used only for mailboxes on
specific servers, which is very hard to predict and control. Therefore,
you should not delete a tag without good reason. If you want to remove
a tag, it is always better to just remove the tag from the policies
when it is present rather than deleting it from the organization.
You
can also disable a tag by editing its properties to set the retention
period to Never. The MFA still considers the tag to be valid, but it
ignores items that are stamped with the tag and never deletes or moves
these items. In addition, although the tag is disabled, the MFA will
not apply the default tag in the policy to these items, so they are
essentially in limbo with respect to retention. Disabling a tag is a
good way of stopping the MFA from processing items while keeping the
items stamped so that they can be reactivated for retention purposes by
just editing the tag to set its retention period to some number of days.
Removing a retention policy
The Remove-RetentionPolicy cmdlet removes a retention policy from the organization. For example:
Remove-RetentionPolicy –Identity 'Retention Policy - PR Department'
Removing
a retention policy removes the policy from any mailboxes to which it is
currently applied. If any mailboxes are associated with the policy, EMS
prompts you to confirm its removal. If you proceed, Exchange removes
the reference to the now-deleted policy from the mailboxes. Exchange
can’t decide what retention should replace the one that has just been
removed, so no policy is applied. Locating the mailboxes to which a
retention policy is applied is therefore a proactive step you should
take before you remove the policy. You can scan mailboxes to discover
where a retention policy is applied with a command such as this:
Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RetentionPolicy –eq "Retention Policy - Audit Department"} | Select NameA
similar set of commands can be run to locate mailboxes with a specific
retention policy and assign a new retention policy to the mailboxes.
For example:
Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RetentionPolicy –eq "Retention Policy – Audit Department"}
| Set-Mailbox –RetentionPolicy 'New Retention Policy for Auditors'Upgrading from managed folders
Managed folders are now a deprecated feature, and the code
that supports these folders will be removed from Exchange in a future
version. It’s therefore important to upgrade managed folders to
equivalent retention tags as soon as possible. You can do this by using
managed folders as templates to create new tags. For example, assume
that you have a managed folder called Never Delete that acts as a
repository for items that users never want to have removed from a
mailbox because they are so important. You could argue that these items
could be stored in an archive mailbox. However, archive mailboxes
didn’t exist in Exchange 2007, and it takes time for people to change
their behavior. You can use a command such as the one shown here to
create a new retention policy tag from the Never Delete managed folder:
New-RetentionPolicyTag –Name 'Mark item to never expire' –ManagedFolderToUpgrade 'Never Delete'
–Comment 'Tag created from old Never Delete managed folder'
To
complete the process, you must associate the new tag with a retention
policy and assign it to a user, and then the user can apply the new tag
to any item in his mailbox rather than just to the items placed in the
managed folder.
