Exchage 2010, Outlook 2010 Local Archives

[d4v0s]

Ok so I have a small environment with about 350 users. Earlier this year I setup a new Exchange server and Rolled out Outlook 2010 on top of Office 2k3 (financial reasons)

The problem

I am getting reports that my users receive messages stating their email box is getting full (this is normal as they only have 256MB of storage). The prompt tells them to run AutoArchive and they are choosing that option.

That part is the disconnect, its not doing a damn thing.

I setup Retention Policy Tags (personal) on a 6 month time frame so it should be running through the entire mailbox and archiving anything older than 6 months (to my understanding).

What I would like to happen
When the mailbox fills up, they get the message, and then my retention policies go through and archive the whole damn box back 6 months (to local archives). Because they use their phones and desktops I want this to be a punishment type policy. If you maintain everything in your mailbox and only keep necessary Items you can keep years of crap so your desktops and phone has it all. If you choose to let it pile up, we will just push back 6 months worth with no discretion. It has to be this way or else we end up with people and their 16gig PST files.

Any help is greatly appreciated calgunners. I have played with the ADMX files and have them working via group policy, what I found was there is no way to push the group policy to all folders in the mailbox. I know someone out there has an idea of how to make it work.

I also think the personal tag is wrong, should I actually just be using the default tags, or Any tags?

[ExtremeX]

My SMB environment is a lot smaller than yours but you are one tough cookie IT guy… my users would want my head with 256MB of exchange storage haha.

I wish I could help, it’s been a while since I actually had to really manage anything exchange / outlook. We ported everything over to MS BPOS / Office 365 now (Hosted Exchange). Our users get a 25GB mail box each.

I never liked dealing with retention policies and auto archive but when I did I don’t think we had any major issues. We just do minor cleanup to maintain hitting the storage cap.

Sounds like your ADMX template via GPO are working; you are just having issues having that policy apply to the entire exchange account? For example it’s working for the inbox but not its subfolders or sent mail folders?

[d4v0s]

Interestingly enough its working on the inbox, but not sent items, deleted or any new folders. (the GPO).

Yeah we are big sticklers, We are strapped for cash here, and with only 1tb or storage for exchange I have to be very careful what I allocate. I figure we will be going to at least 1GB long term, but we are in a hiring slowdown right now and a few years ago we have over 900 employees. So we have to be very careful how we give it out now if things speed up.

Cost is the worst thing to worry about in IT, it just screws everything else up ha ha ha

How much does the office 365 run with 25gig each. That sounds amazing!

[ExtremeX]

Trust me I know… I am the head decision maker for anything technology related for the company I am at. That included being the one man band IT guy for the entire operation. Money for licenses and hardware was a killer. We are a small shop, but need/want all the big boy tools. Trying to do it all in house was killing me. At one point we did do it in house, but not for long. I still run basic services in house like AD, File and Print servers, WINS, DNS, DHCP roles on windows server plus a few other things like a dedicated file server for D2D backups.

For us, it was a no brainer moving to Office 365… (I have been with Microsoft since the product was called BPOS), and the price per user was also lowered.

$8 per person per month gives me…

Complete integration with outlook, OWA, calendars contacts all the exchange jazz you have now. (25GB box size is standard)
Use of your own domain name.
Access to Forefront firewall filtering, also hosted with admin level access.
Active Directory sync so its seamless for users.
SharePoint Intranet server also hosted.
Microsoft Lync (Hosted).. chat, live meeting, all that stuff…
24x7 live support and they are amazing.

My migration from Exchange Server 2007 to 2011 was done with 1 phone call and a couple clicks online. Everything happened in the background with zero downtime. It’s one of the smartest moves I’ve made for my office.

To be honest after taking the two other servers offline and the reduced cost of power and cooling, almost pays for the service. Plus I don’t really do anything anymore; I just sit around and spend time on calguns.