Any compliance and archiving project which is based on Exchange Server will be comprised of several pieces in order to build the entire solution. One of the pieces of that puzzle will almost certainly be Messaging Records Management (MRM). MRM is designed to allow you to define the disposition of messages of a certain message class and/or age.

A simpler form of MRM was present in Exchange 2003 as a part of the Recipient Policy called Mailbox Manager Settings. From one perspective, the Exchange 2007 MRM is just that feature on steroids. However, it has far more capabilities than Mailbox Manager (MM) ever did. Perhaps surprisingly, there is also one feature that was not carried forward into Exchange 2007 - the report that gets generated each time MM was run. Frankly, that’s not a huge loss.

As are many things in the Exchange 2007/Windows 2008 world, MRM is based on the creation of a MRM policy which gets applied to a user object. The MRM policy consists of a number of managed folders which have settings applied against them. A managed folder is basically any folder in a mailbox which has settings applied against it. No surprise, but there are specific names for each these. For your reference, they are:

• Managed Folder Mailbox Policy, which applies to a user object and contains a list of managed folders
• Managed Folder, a folder in a mailbox which has managed content settings
• Managed Content Settings, which applies to a managed folder

Managed Folders are either Default Managed Folders (i.e., the standard folders that you see in every mailbox) or Custom Managed Folders (which are folders created by the Mailbox Management Process if they don’t already exist in a user’s mailbox).

A quick word on licensing - Custom Managed Folders are only available if you have the Enterprise CAL for your Exchange users.
A managed folder mailbox policy is nothing more than a container for a group of managed folders and their associated content settings.
Now that you know what they are, what are these things for?

Managed content settings allow you to do two things, with quite a bit of granularity: [1] you can define the retention period of a mailbox item, and [2] you can decide where to journal the mailbox item.

As you may be aware, a mailbox item can be any of a variety of message classes. The ones that manage contents settings are aware of are: All Content, Calendar Items, Contacts, Documents, E-mail, Faxes, Meetings, Missed Calls, Notes, Posts, RSS Items, Tasks, Voice Mail, and Journal Items.

Based on any of these message classes, you can decide how long that item is to be retained in the managed folder, and what the final disposition of the item is. Your disposition choices are:

• simply delete the message (move to Deleted Items folder)
• shift-delete the message (immediately delete, but allow recovery)
• permanently delete the message (immediately delete, with no recovery)
• move the message to a custom managed folder
• mark the message as retention expired

As part of the same selection criteria, you can also define whether you want the message to be journaled. Journaling can occur to any mail-enabled object (mail-enabled user, mailbox-enabled user, contact, mail-enabled public folder). You can also choose what format (TNEF or *.msg) you want the message to be journaled in.

Once you have defined your managed content settings, it is a simple matter to identify groups of them and place them into managed folder mailbox policies. Then assign those policies to users, either at creation time or later (the New Mailbox wizard includes the option for setting the policy, you can also use the set-mailbox PowerShell cmdlet to set the policy on a user object).

This short article doesn’t do them full justice, but check them out - they can be a valuable addition to your compliance toolkit.