To be able to archive the content of IM sent through Office Communications Server, deploy Archiving Server, which is a server role in Office Communications Server. To deploy an Archiving Server, run the Office Communications Server deployment tool, choosing the role of Archiving Server during setup.

Archiving Server also requires an Archiving Server database using Microsoft SQL Server. The database can be collocated on the same computer as Archiving Server, or on a different computer, as described in this section.

The Archiving Server feature includes four components:

• The Archiving agents, which are installed and activated automatically on every Front End Server and Standard Edition server. The agents capture messages for archiving and send them to the destination queue on the Archiving Server. Although agents are activated automatically, no messages are actually captured unless an Archiving Server is deployed and associated with that Enterprise pool or Standard Edition server and archiving is enabled at the forest level and the pool level.
  
  
• The Archiving Server, which is the server role that reads the messages from the archiving agents in the Front End Servers and then writes them to the Archiving Back-End database.
  
  
• The Archiving Server Back-End database, which runs on SQL Server and stores the archived messages.
  
  

For a list of hardware and software requirements for Archiving Server and the server running the Archiving Server database, see Internal Office Communications Server Component Requirementsin the Supported Topologies and Infrastructure Requirements documentation.

Each Archiving Server can archive messages from one or more Enterprise pools or Standard Edition servers. When you deploy an Archiving Server, you associate it with the Front End Servers that home the users whose messages it will archive. Figure 1 illustrates two possible Archiving Server topologies.

Figure 1. Archiving Server topologies

Note:

You can associate multiple Archiving Servers with a single Archiving database that runs on a different computer. In this topology, it is important to configure the purge time for the Archiving Servers to avoid potential database lockouts that can occur when purges run simultaneously. For details about configuring the purge time, see Configuring the Number of Days to be Logged by Archiving Serverin the Administering Office Communications Server 2007 R2 documenation.

Before deploying Archiving Server, you must install the following software:

• Message Queuing, with Active Directory Integration enabled, on the server running Archiving Server
  
  
• Message Queuing, with Active Directory Integration enabled, on each Front End Server and Standard Edition server that hosts users who will have IM archived
  
  

Deploy Archiving Server after you have deployed at least one Enterprise pool or Standard Edition server. Be sure to associate a pool or a Standard Edition server with a deployed Archiving Server when you enable archiving on that pool or server, so that the IM messages will be collected and stored.

If archiving is critical in your organization for compliance reasons, be sure to deploy an Archiving Server and enable archiving for all your users or individual users before you enable those users for Office Communications Server.

When you deploy Archiving Server, you associate it with one or more Front End Servers. Archiving Server then collects IM message content from conversations involving the users homed on those servers. In a smaller network environment, one Archiving Server can handle the load of your whole deployment.

For best scalability, do not collocate Archiving Server with another server role. Hosting the Archiving Server databases on a separate computer from the Archiving Server itself does not significantly improve performance.

A single Archiving Server can serve up to 300,000 users. If you have multiple pools that total less than 300,000 users, we recommend that you associate all these pools with a single Archiving Server, to simplify administration and data retrieval. Alternatively, if you have pools at different physical locations, it may make more sense to deploy an Archiving Server at each location.

If archiving is mission-critical for your organization, and you configure Office Communications Server to shut down if archiving is not possible (for example, if the Archiving database cannot be written to), you may want to associate multiple Archiving Servers with the various Front End Servers in the pool. Then, if one Archiving Server is unavailable, only the Front End Server associated with that Archiving Server will shut down, leaving the other Front End Servers available.

Before you deploy Archiving Server, you need to verify that your system infrastructure and the server on which you will install Archiving Server meet the requirements that are described in Internal Office Communications Server Component Requirementsin the Supported Topologies and Infrastructure Requirements documentation. When the environment is ready, you install the Archiving Server files, activate the server, start the services, and associate the Archiving Server with the servers that home the users whose messages will be archived. Table 1 provides an overview of the required steps. Deploying Archiving Serverin the Deploying Office Communications Server 2007 R2 for Internal User Access documentation provides detailed instructions.

Table 1. Archiving Server Deployment Process