As email and other forms of unstructured electronically stored information (U-ESI) have continued to strain the upper limits of mailboxes, mail servers, file stores, archives and other data repositories along with taxing the patience of information governance policy makers, users have been looking to their solutions providers for help. With roughly 65% of enterprises committed to some version of MS Exchange as their primary messaging platform, it is no wonder users have been turning towards Redmond for relief.
Recently Microsoft made a beta version of Exchange 2010 (E2010) available for download with a slew of new features and functionality to improve upon the 2007 version (E2007). Apparently Microsoft has been listening to users who have griped about mailbox size restrictions, limited archiving and compliance capabilities, the management of PSTs, the security and manageability issues in general along with the need for additional administrative controls and views.
Mailbox Approach
With E2010, Microsoft has made improvements to support a mailbox size of up to 10GB with 100,000 objects. They have also added a Personal Archive (PA) feature which looks like a PST folder within Outlook, maintains folder integrity, but is configured by an administrator and allows for direct access to the primary mailbox. This archive or secondary mailbox uses the same address as the primary mailbox and quotas only apply to the primary, not to the archive.
Once a PA is activated that mailbox is no longer able to create PSTs but can still open or view existing PSTs. While administrators push out folders or PAs to users the onus is on the user to maintain item level retention policies even though administrators can apply policy to folders. However, the rules are time based, not context based.
Microsoft has made improvements to its multi-mailbox search capabilities and added new legal hold and auditing functions. The multi-mailbox search capability does not yet extend to third-party repositories or archives. Regarding legal hold, the key difference for E2010 is that administrators can now capture edited and deleted items for users placed on legal hold and not just suspend the auto-purge cycle, as per retention hold in E2007.
As with E2007, email stubbing is unnecessary as performance in Exchange is an item issue and not a size issue. However, it is not clear what performance hit Exchange servers will suffer due to PAs being maintained on the mail server and the super-sizing of each mailbox. Overall storage requirements will probably increase.
Microsoft strongly believes it has included features that optimize for large mailbox scenarios including: reduction in I/O plus smoother I/O patterns that enable use of less expensive, desktop-quality SATA discs and replication which, when more than three copies are maintained, enables RAID-less/JBOD storage. For more insights into how E2010 might perform under this additional workload, users can turn to Microsoft’s Tech center for information on MS Exchange 2007 Performance and Scalability.
MailTIPS
A feature called MailTips will help remind users to protect sensitive data from accidental distribution. Along with pre-configured MailTIPS such as alert for mail gong to a large group or external audience, users can create custom MailTIPS to prompt policy reminders. E2010 will also give users the ability to view email by conversation and also provide a muting function for any thread where a user wants to opt out.
Transport Approach
E2010 has improved administrative capabilities including enhanced journaling to a separate mailbox or third party archive. The inclusion of digital signatures is not yet a feature. A important new feature for this release is Information Rights Management (IRM) decryption and encryption. A key benefit here is that organizations can now apply IRM-protection automatically rather than requiring users to apply it manually in Outlook.
E2010 continues to use the Exchange JET database but has updated the store schema and made performance improvements to support faster, more efficient index building for large mailboxes. Administrative searches can be performed under the covers. Microsoft suggests E2010 will improve time-to-discovery with native searching of emails and documents although, for the time being, searching PDFs and other unstructured content such as images and the like will be non-native. See the footnotes section below for Microsoft’s official documentation of features for your reference.
Futures and Concerns
While E2010 promises to improve on many areas where users have been struggling, Exchange administrators will probably have questions regarding performance and scalability. And while improvements continue in Information Rights Management, security and policy administrators need to be comfortable with the strength of these defend, detect, and protect mechanisms in order to ensure that usability and acceptance can be achieved in a reliable way.
Many of E2010's features will work in Outlook Web Access (OWA), but Office 2010 will be required to use them on the desktop, although Microsoft is creating an Outlook 2007 add-on to enable access to the archive. The working version of E2010 is not due out until late this year, and until service pack 1 (SP1) is available a live implementation is not recommended. It is also not clear what incentives Microsoft will offer enterprise customers who have already made major investments in E2007, Outlook and SharePoint 2007 and how well they will all interoperate.
Bottom line
Microsoft has obviously been listening to customers and watching the evolution of messaging solutions - most of which are not scaling well with the growth of U-ESI. See Managing Archiving and Retention Risk. Due to the ubiquity of Exchange in the enterprise mail fabric, by necessity the marketplace looks to Microsoft to supply features and functions users require to meet their audit, compliance, information governance, eDiscovery and knowledge management challenges.
Action Item: Especially in industries where the regulatory environment dictates tighter control and supervision of unstructured data and where litigation and eDiscovery activities are on the rise, enterprises heavily invested in Exchange will need to explore the Exchange 2010 beta version and determine which features and functions will obviate the need for third party solutions to accomplish similar critical tasks.
Footnotes:
