Topic Last Modified: 2011-01-31

Corporations and other organizations are subject to an increasing number of industry and government regulations that require the retention of specific types of communications. With the Archiving Server feature, Microsoft Lync Server 2010 provides a way for you to archive instant messaging (IM) content, conferencing (meeting) content, or both that is sent through Lync Server 2010.

If you deploy Archiving Server and associate it with Front End pools, you can set it to archive instant messages and conferences and specify the users for which archiving is enabled. When you deploy Archiving Server, a global policy is created by default. You can use the global policy to enable archiving of internal communications (that is, communications between internal users) and external communications (that is, communications that include at least one non-internal user). You can also specify the users for whom archiving is enabled by creating policies for specific users or sites. If archiving is enabled, the instant messages from all multiparty conferences involving users can also archived, even if you have set Archiving Server to archive the messages of only specified users and sites.

The following types of content are archived:

The following types of content are not archived:

To configure archiving, you need to specify the following:

For details about these options, see Defining Your Requirements for Archiving.

If you enable archiving in one Front End pool or Standard Edition server, you should then enable it for all other Front End pools and Standard Edition servers in your deployment. You need to do this because users whose communications are required to be archived can be invited to a group IM conversation or meetings hosted on a different pool. If archiving is not enabled on the pool where the conversation or meeting is hosted, the session cannot be archived.