Earlier this month, Microsoft disclosed details on Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) which will ship later this year. Among the various fixes and improvements outlined in the announcement, Microsoft’s plans for archiving and eDiscovery enhancements caught my attention.
Some of the key archiving message archiving advances planned for SP1 are:
- Storage flexibility for a user’s Personal Archive. With the initial release of Exchange 2010, Personal Archives can only be stored in the same mailbox database as the original mailbox. SP1 will introduce the ability to provision a user's Personal Archive to a different mailbox database from their primary mailbox, supporting tiered storage options for archived mail.
- Support for access to a user's Personal Archive with Outlook 2007. In the currently shipping version of Exchange 2010, organisations need either Outlook 2010 or OWA to view archived content.
- Improved PST ingestion. Exchange 2010 SP1 will enable organisations to import historical e-mail data from .PST files directly into Exchange, rather than having to go through the primary mailbox. While this represents an improvement, this forthcoming offering won’t provide native capabilities to crawl enterprise networks, automatically ingesting .PST files into an archive.
In addition to these improvements, Microsoft plans a number of other Exchange 2010 SP1 advances to bolster retention, search, and other functionality that will support organisations’ legal risk mitigation objectives.
So, will Microsoft Exchange 2010 SP1 fully address organisational needs for message archiving and eDiscovery? Is Microsoft seeking to knock out current providers of message archiving solutions? The answer on both counts is a clear “no.” Microsoft continues to partner with a broad ecosystem of message archiving and eDiscovery vendors.
Exchange 2010 SP1, however, will deliver some important advances on these fronts. For organisations with no message archiving systems in place, the offering will represent a step up. For firms with minimal storage optimisation and legal risk mitigation needs, Exchange 2010 SP1 may help meet archiving and compliance objectives. For most organisations, however, third-party archiving and eDiscovery solutions will remain important.