E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

Manage Rules in 2 Places?

tpartridge — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:46:52 GMT

So, does this mean that a records manager will need to create/maintain retention and disposition rules for email from within the Exchange Admin and then switch to a different admin application (SharePoint) to do the same for all other documents? What happens if I save an MSG to a SharePoint site, do the rules there take precedent over the Exchange rules?

Any plans to integrate these two administrative features into a single interface for Records Managers?

Manage the content not the format!

Russell — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:16:27 GMT

Have to say that this approach of managing the email format seperately from its other related content, and maintaining multiple rule systems seems a big weakness of MOSS 2007 if one was seeking to use it as a records management tool in a agency that had serious evidence, discovery and reuse requirements. It has been discussed in other threads as Adam alluded to in the original post, but this is managing by format, encouraging the disassociation of recordkeeping context, and problematic to maintain.

I believe that this will be a big barrier to MOSS 2007 meeting records management requirements for other than small to medium non-government organisations.

Cheers

re: E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

YoDJMC — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:41:38 GMT

So if the records manager is creating a policy against an email, what policy is applied to any attachments? Whatever the argument about handling emails in special ways, the biggest challenge I feel is handling attachments - typically these are more likely to have specific meta data requirements, perhaps with the requirement for user captured data?

re: E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

NSherman — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 05:07:11 GMT

I, too, am a bit concerned about the efficiency of having to manage two repositories. If I wanted to find all "stuff" relating to a certain person or project so that I could apply a litigation hold, would I have to go to two places? Would I have to review two places for all holds before I could authorize destruction? Having it separate, rather than together, seems to reinforce the mistaken idea that email and "regular" documents are two different things when it comes to retention.

re: E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

Sean Dillon — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:43:31 GMT

I wouldn't say the MOSS rules "take precedent" over the Exchange rules, they are really two different server infrastructures for managing two different types of digital content. I would say you should/could use Exchange (w/o MOSS) for managing an organization's *E-MAIL MESSAGES* using managed folders, retention, expiration, journaling, etc. Exchange is not the place to manage other forms of digital content (documents, images, etc.) as records, that's what MOSS provides. Instead of managing e-mail records in Exchange, and all other digital content in MOSS, the strategy could be to use journaling in Exchange to move e-mail content over to MOSS, where *ALL* official records are kept. Some organizations will want to do this for Exchange, but they won't be using MOSS or vice versa.

I'm not sure I would view having the flexibility of establishing Exchange policies AND/OR MOSS records management policies as a weakness; instead, I would say it gives organizations a choice to manage data where it makes the most sense given their information management requirements. I think we do need to understand a little more about categorization of e-mail by content/context; that would help this discussion, as it might serve to show how MOSS could route those records appropriately within the records repository upon receipt of messages from Exchange based on the content/context of the message.

Regarding attachments, I'm not sure if Adam is planning on discussing all the options you have around how/what to store from messages sent into the MOSS records repository or not? I don't want to steal his thunder, but know that there are a few different options here that might be of interest.

re: E-mail Records Management, Part 3: E-mail Retention

recman — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:34:16 GMT

Sean - Don't worry about stealing my thunder, and thanks for the insightful comments. =) I agree with your comments about the need to provide compliance tools, no matter where the data lives. Certainly flexibility was one of the key design tenants here – we are designing a platform that will meet the needs of millions of customers.

I'm hoping that my recent fourth post on email records management (http://blogs.msdn.com/recman/archive/2007/02/08/e-mail-records-management-part-4-quota-management-and-sending-e-mail-to-the-records-center.aspx) answers the other questions in this comment thread. We do indeed have a way of getting data from Exchange to SharePoint - where records can be managed consistently based upon the content, regardless of medium.

Our design philosophy here was to provide tools to span the wide range of places where information might live and direct the important, high business value content to a Records Center, where it can be centrally managed.

Thanks all!

Adam Harmetz

Program Manager

Archiving Solutions for Exchange Server 2007

Anderson Patricio Get-news Blog — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 06:51:23 GMT

Hello folks, We can see many times in the Exchange Server 2007 documentation that we can keep information