Creating a retention policy
Now that you have created the necessary retention tags to help
managers impose order on their mailboxes, you can create a new
retention policy. Under the Compliance Management section of EAC,
choose Retention Policies and click New (+). You have to name the
retention policy and add the set of retention tags that enable the new
policy to impose some level of retention compliance on the users to
whom you assign the policy.
Retention policy names are entirely
internal and are never revealed to users. The major step in building
the policy is to scan the set of available tags and select the
necessary ones (Figure 6).
When the required tags are selected, click OK to return to the initial
screen and then Save to create the new policy. EAC then checks to
ensure that the set of tags is valid and that you haven’t done
something such as specifying two default retention tags or two folder
tags for the same folder.
When EAC returns to Compliance Management, you should then see something like Figure 7
with the new policy listed in the set of retention policies defined for
the organization and the set of retention tags used by the policy shown
in the action pane.
You
can also create retention policies through EMS by using the
New-RetentionPolicy cmdlet. In this command, you create the policy and
associate the 11 tags you want to use with the new policy. Don’t worry
about uppercasing the tag names as defined. EMS can locate tags as long
as you spell their names correctly.
New-RetentionPolicy –Name 'Management Retention Policy' –RetentionPolicyTagLinks 'Archive after 2 years', 'Calendar 5 years', 'Delete after 5 years', 'Deleted Items 7', 'Inbox 30', 'Junk Mail 3', 'Keep for Audit', 'Retain for 10 years', 'RSS Feeds 3', 'Sent Items 30', 'Sync Issues 1'
You can examine details of the new retention policy with the Get-RetentionPolicy cmdlet:
Get-RetentionPolicy –Identity 'Management retention policy' | Format-List
Some
of the properties Get-RetentionPolicy reveals apply to Exchange Online
only. For example, Exchange Online enables administrators to mark a
retention policy as default (IsDefault = $True), meaning that Exchange
applies this policy to users’ mailboxes if another retention policy
isn’t assigned.
Provided there is good reason for each tag to
exist in the policy, a 10-tag policy composed of some folder tags, a
default tag, and some personal tags is a reasonably simple retention
policy because other policies can incorporate a lot more tags to create
a very exact retention environment for a user to operate within. You
might have more tags than this if you decide to include a retention
policy tag for every default folder. Using retention policy tags to
clean out items that otherwise accumulate and are never cleared out in
default folders such as Sync Issues, Junk E-Mail, and RSS Feeds is a
good example of where you can gain real value from a well-designed
retention policy.
