There are two technologies in my IT Pro life that I am very passionate about, SharePoint and Exchange, so why not incorporate both passions in a single blog post. In this two part series I will be discussing how we can manage email records from our Exchange mailboxes and archive them in SharePoint Document Libraries for compliance or collaboration reasons. Exchange 2007 introduced a great new feature set in the name of “Messaging Records Management” or commonly referred to as MRM. Managed Default Folders is a key component of MRM which will assist us in achieving our archiving strategy. Exchange 2007’s MRM functionality provides organisations with the ability to set email-retention policies, the ability to manage content residing in mailboxes and to establish an archiving strategy to SharePoint Document Libraries.
This is a great feature when you want to combine email records from various users working on a particular project and have them reside under the Team SharePoint Site Document Library. In this 2 part post I will provide step by step instructions on how this can be achieved with today’s post focusing on Exchange and the creation of our managed “project” folder .
So let’s begin by firing up the Exchange Management Console and navigating to Organization Configuration / Mailbox and then click on the Managed Default Folders Tab. You will notice the system default folders listed as per the below screen shot.
In our case we will create a new Managed Custom Folder for a specific project that we will later integrate with a specific document library located under our project team site.
In order to create our Managed Custom Folder, navigate to Actions and select New Managed Custom Folder..to invoke the wizard.
Enter the Name, Display Name and Description similar to the below screen shot.
Please take note of the Exchange Enterprise CAL requirement.
After filling the details click New. Your managed folder has now been created and listed under the Managed Custom Folders Tab per the below screenshot.
If you are an Exchange Management Shell person and would like to create a managed custom folder that way, all you need to do is simply type in the below command.
New-ManagedFolder -Name Project XYZ -FolderName “Project XYZ”
Now that our Managed Custom Folder has been created, we need to create a Managed Folder Mailbox policy. Also located under Actions, Select New Managed Folder Mailbox Policy …
Creating a managed folder mailbox policy setting is great when grouping together a set of managed folders that you can then assign to a user mailbox in the one step.
Type in your managed folder mailbox policy name and then select Add to select the Managed Custom folder that we had just created earlier.
Your newly created policy will now be listed under the Managed Folder Mailbox Policies Tab as per the below screen shot.
We now have the capability to assign this policy to our users. So let’s now do so by navigating to Recipient Configuration / Mailbox. Right click on your user and select Properties / Mailbox Settings.
Select Messaging Records Management and then click on properties. From here, click on browse and select the Policy that we have just created.
When applying the settings you will receive a warning regarding compatibility with different Outlook versions, but we can ignore this warning as we are all running Outlook 2007/10 right?
Now that we have created our custom managed folder and policy we need to ensure that our Managed Folder Assistant Schedule has been setup. To so, navigate to Server Configuration / Mailbox and right click on the top pane on your server name and select properties. Then click on the Messaging Records Management tab.
By default it will be set to “Never Run”. We will click on Customize and set a schedule for it to run during non business office hours.
Now rather than waiting for the next scheduled time we can force the process via the Exchange Management Shell by running the following command.
Start-ManagedFolderAssistant
The below entry should appear in your Windows Application Event Log when the Managed Folder Assistant routine is run.
Event Type: Information
Event Source: MSExchange Assistants
Event Category: Assistants
Event ID: 9022
Date: 16/07/2009
Time: 11:01:18 AM
User: N/A
Computer: EXCHANGESERVER
Description:
Service MSExchangeMailboxAssistants. Managed Folder Mailbox Assistant for database Users Mailbox Database/Users Mailbox Database (ed6raqeq29db3-7301-4443-8917-a3b6e7857dd1) has finished an on-demand request. 1002 out of 1002 mailboxes were successfully processed. 0 mailboxes were skipped due to errors.
I can now open up Outlook for the user we applied the policy to and see that the Project XYZ managed folder has been created and listed under Managed Folders. Remember, this is the folder that our user can now drag emails into for compliance or archive reasons.
Now that we have successfully created and deployed our Managed Folder Project XYZ we will continue our journey in Part 2 where we will mail enable a SharePoint Document Library providing it with an SMTP address and creating a Managed Content Setting that will be applied to our manage custom folder “Project XYZ”. This will enable us to control the lifespan of items that are moved into our Project XYZ Managed Folder that we have created and to also enable journaling on that folder to forward a copy to an alternative address, in our case the SharePoint Document Library SMTP address for archive.