Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 : Messaging records management (part 5) - Applying a retention policy to mailboxes

Applying a retention policy to mailboxes

You can apply retention policies to mailboxes by:

When assigned to a mailbox, the policy becomes active the next time the MFA processes the mailbox. At this point, MFA writes the policy information into the mailbox. Until MFA processes the mailbox, the policy tags will not appear in the client user interface, so the lack of these tags is a good indication that the MFA has not yet gotten to a mailbox. You can force the issue by running the Start-ManagedFolderAssistant cmdlet as follows, passing the name of the mailbox you want MFA to process:

Start-ManagedFolderAssistant –Identity 'Tony Redmond'

If you’re setting a policy for a group of users (see Figure 9), you’ll probably do it in one operation by selecting the mailboxes with the Get-Mailbox cmdlet and piping the results to Set-Mailbox. For example:

Figure 9. Assigning a retention policy to a mailbox

Get-Mailbox –Filter {CustomAttribute7 –eq 'Management'} | Set-Mailbox
–RetentionPolicy 'Management retention policy' –RetentionComment 'Management retention policy applies to this mailbox'

To discover the set of mailboxes that have retention policies in place, you can use a command like this:

Get-Mailbox –Filter {RetentionPolicy –ne $Null} | Format-Table Name, RetentionPolicy –AutoSize

Set-Mailbox –Identity 'TRedmond' –RetentionPolicy 'Management retention policy'  –RetentionComment 'Management retention policy applies to this mailbox' –RetentionURL 'http://Intranet.contoso.com/RetentionPolicies.html'

By looking at the parameters that set retention information with the Set-Mailbox command, you can see that the RetentionComment property provides the text you can see beside Account Settings. The RetentionUrl property populates the URL for the More Information link, hopefully taking the user to a website on which she can find some additional information to explain why a retention policy is necessary and what it means to the user. It is good practice to set up such a website and populate it with some practical examples of what a retention policy means to a user. For instance, it could explain to users that items in some of the default folders are automatically cleared to the archive after a certain period. Taking such a step might just save some expensive help desk calls!

Figure 10. How Outlook shows retention policy information in its backstage area

It is common practice to set these properties when you place a mailbox on any type of hold (in-place or retention). These topics will be discussed in the following sections. For now, although you don’t have to set these properties to impose an effective retention regime, they are helpful to communicate information to users about what’s going on in their mailbox. Experience with many projects demonstrates that anything that assists in effective communications with users is likely to reduce help desk calls.

Set-Mailbox –Identity 'JSmith' –RetentionPolicy $Null –RetentionComment $Null  –RetentionURL $Null

After you begin to deploy retention policies to mailboxes, the question arises of how to integrate the assignment of retention policies with any user provisioning process your company has in place. Unless you also enable an archive for a mailbox when it is created, Exchange won’t assign a default retention policy automatically, so an explicit administrative action is usually required to allocate a retention policy to a mailbox. This action is not difficult to code with EMS, but it is something that needs to be considered as part of your deployment plan.