If you mention PSTs to Exchange Administrators, you will see many of them cringe. Personal store (*.pst) files are used by users to store e-mails locally, instead of keeping them in their online Exchange mailbox. Very often users employ PSTs because they find themselves restricted by mailbox quotas, unaware that in the long term they are exposing themselves and the organization to a PST management nightmare (think of backups or a mailbox search spanning some 8 different files). Apart from this, there is an increased risk of data theft and increased electronic discovery cost as a result of keeping these PST files in so many different locations.
Another common PST application is brick level backups with the export-mailbox cmdlet (and ExMerge in earlier Exchange versions). This also leads to similar problems inherent to email storage fragmentation.
The Personal Archive feature in Exchange 2010 (also known as an "Online Archive") aims to end the PST hell by providing an alternative online storage location where historical e-mail data can be stored. Using Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web App, users will be able to see a secondary mailbox along side their primary mailbox to which they can drag and drop e-mails (and PST files!) as they please. The administrator can also set retention polices to move or delete e-mails after a given period of time. What's more is that this mailbox has a seperate quota - called an "archive quota" - separate from the quota for the primary mailbox.
The rest of this article will explain how to enable and disable the Personal Archive, setup an archive quota, and configure retention tags and retention policies to automatically move e-mails into the Personal Archive.
Enabling and Disabling the Personal Archive
To create a new mailbox and enable the personal archive feature; from the Exchange Management Console, navigate to Recipient Configuration, right click the Mailbox node and select "New Mailbox". This will launch the New Mailbox wizard.
Follow the wizard until you get to the Archive Settings page where you will be asked to select whether you want to create an archive mailbox for this new account. Select this checkbox and press Next to start the mailbox creation process.
The "Create an archive mailbox for this account" option simply runs a Powershell cmdlet with the "-Archive" parameter in the background.
To create a new mailbox and set it with the personal archive feature enabled, from the Exchange Management Shell execute the cmdlet:
New-Mailbox -UserPrincipalName jenniferp@domain.com -Archive -Database "Mailbox Database" -Name JenniferPeach -Password "pa55w0rd" - FirstName Jennifer -LastName Peach -DisplayName "Jennifer Peach" -ResetPasswordOnNextLogon $True
This is basically the same cmdlet you would run when creating a normal mailbox via the powershell, but includes the "-Archive" parameter. We set the "ResetPasswordOnNextLogon" to "$true" so that the next time this new user logs on, they will be prompted to change their password.
Enabling or disabling the personal archive feature on an already existing mailbox is easy.
To do this via the Exchange Management Console:
- Navigate to Recipient Configuration | Mailbox
- Right click on the mailbox you wish to add an archive mailbox for and select "Enable Archive"
- You will be presented with a prompt explaining how online archives are a premium feature that are only available when using an Enterprise license. Click OK to proceed.
- You will notice that the icon for this user's mailbox changes. This indicates that the mailbox has the online archive feature enabled.
To disable the personal archive feature, simply right click on the user's mailbox and select "Disable Archive".
To do this via the Exchange Management Shell:
Execute the cmdlet:
Enable-Mailbox "Rachel Peach" - Archive
"Rachel Peach" would be the name of the mailbox for which you want to enable the personal archive feature.
If successful, you will be presented with the details of that mailbox (as shown below):
To disable the personal archive feature, use the following cmdlet:
Disable-Mailbox "Rachel Peach" -Archive
Once you have enabled the personal archive feature, you can change the Personal Archive mailbox display name that appears within Outlook or the Outlook Web App by following the instructions below.
From the Exchange Management Console:
- Right click on the user's mailbox and select Properties
- From the Mailbox Features tab, select the Archive feature and click the Properties button
- Edit the name of the archive mailbox and press OK and then OK again to close the Properties dialog.
Setting an Archive Quota
Currently, you cannot set the Archive Quota from the Exchange Management Console. However, you can set the Archive Warning Quota. To do this:
- Navigate to Recipient Configuration | Mailbox
- Right click on the mailbox you want to configure and select Properties
- In the Mailbox Settings tab, select Archive Quota and click the Properties button
- Enable the "Issue warning at (MB):" checkbox and enter a value
- Press OK and then OK again to close the Properties dialog.
To set the Archive Quota from the Exchange Management Shell, run the following cmdlet:
Set-Mailbox "Rachel Peach" -ArchiveQuota 2GB -ArchiveWarningQuota 1GB
...and of course to set the quota for all mailboxes in a store:
Get-Mailbox -Database | Set-Mailbox -ArchiveQuota 2GB -ArchiveWarningQuota 1GB