Messaging records management (MRM) is the records management technology in Exchange that helps organizations to reduce legal risks associated with e-mail and other communications. In Exchange 2010, MRM is accomplished by using the following new retention features:

• Retention tags   Retention tags are used to apply retention settings to messages and folders. There are three types of retention tags:
  
  
  • Default policy tags (DPTs)
    
    
  • Retention policy tags (RPTs)
    
    
  • Personal tags
    
    
• Retention policies   A retention policy is a group of retention tags that can be applied to a mailbox.
  
  

Applying retention policies to the mailboxes in your organization allows you to apply message retention settings without impacting your users' e-mail workflow or e-mail organization methods. Also, with retention tags, users can tag messages and folders based on retention requirements. They no longer need to move messages to folders only for retention purposes (as was required by the managed folders feature in Exchange Server 2007).

Note:
Managed folders, the MRM technology introduced in Exchange 2007, is still available in Exchange 2010. For more information, see Understanding Managed Folders.

To learn more about the retention features in Exchange 2010, see Understanding Retention Tags and Retention Policies.

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In Exchange 2010, Multi-Mailbox Search helps organizations facing legal discovery requirements (as part of organizational policy, compliance requirements, or lawsuits), to search for relevant content in Exchange mailboxes. Exchange 2010 provides a seamless experience for searching e-mail content in mailboxes across the entire Exchange organization.

To learn more about Multi-Mailbox Search, see Understanding Multi-Mailbox Search.

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In Exchange 2010, Multi-Mailbox Search allows a user who is assigned the Discovery Management role to search mailbox content to comply with discovery requests. However, users who own the mailbox or have permissions to access it can delete messages. Furthermore, if a retention policy or a managed folder mailbox policy is applied to the mailbox, messages can be removed from the mailbox by the Managed Folder Assistant.

In Exchange 2010, you can place mailboxes on litigation hold to protect against intentional, policy-based, or accidental message deletion. This allows deleted messages to be indexed by Exchange Search. As a result, these messages are returned when Multi-Mailbox Search is used to search the mailbox. After a mailbox is placed on litigation hold, any changes made to messages are also preserved as different versions.

To learn more about litigation hold, see Understanding Litigation Hold.

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Protecting critical business information is an important aspect of information protection. Regulations in many countries, regions, and industries (such as financial services and healthcare), require organizations to protect personal information collected from customers and employees. Most business communication occurs over e-mail, and many users also use e-mail as an information and document repository.

To help protect this critical information, Exchange 2010 includes the following Information Rights Management (IRM) features:

• Support for Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) rights policy templates.
  
  
• Persistent protection of attachments in IRM-protected messages.
  
  
• Outlook protection rules protect messages in Microsoft Outlook 2010 based on rule conditions.
  
  
• Transport protection rules protect messages based on transport rule conditions.
  
  
• Transport decryption decrypts IRM-protected messages on Hub Transport servers, which allows you to apply messaging policies.
  
  
• Journal report decryption attaches a decrypted copy of IRM-protected messages to journal reports.
  
  
• Support for IRM in Microsoft Office Outlook Web App.
  
  
• IRM-protection for Unified Messaging voice mail messages.
  
  

To learn more about IRM features, see Understanding Information Rights Management.

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Personal archives provide your users with an alternate storage location for storing historical messaging data. Using Outlook 2010 and Outlook Web App, users have seamless access to their personal archive. Using either of these client applications, they can view a personal archive and move or copy messages between their primary mailbox and the archive. Messages can also be automatically moved from the primary mailbox to the archive by using an archive policy.

Personal archives allow you to present your users with a consistent view of their messaging data, and they also eliminate the user overhead required to manage .pst files. Eliminating use of .pst files significantly reduces your organization's exposure to several risks.

To learn more about personal archives, see Understanding Personal Archives.

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Transport rules inspect messages for conditions specified in the rule. Messages that meet the conditions, and none of the exceptions, have the specified actions applied to them. Exchange 2010 includes several new predicates and actions, providing additional flexibility when creating rules. To learn more, see Transport Rule Predicates and Transport Rule Actions.

The New-TransportRule and Set-TransportRule cmdlets are also enhanced, allowing you to specify all predicates and actions in a single command. All predicates and actions are now available for use as parameters with these cmdlets. To learn more about these cmdlets, see New-TransportRule and Set-TransportRule.

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