Corporations and other organizations are subject to an increasing number of industry and government regulations that require the retention of both e-mail and IM conversations. Office Communications Server 2007 R2, with its Archiving Serverfeature, provides a way for you to archive IM communications sent through Office Communications Server.

If you deploy Archiving Server and associate it with Front End Servers in a pool, you can set it to archive the IM messages from conversations of all users in that pool, or just the IM messages for conversations involving only the users you specify. If archiving is enabled for a pool, the IM messages from all multiparty conferences involving users in the pool are also archived, even if you have set Archiving Server to archive the messages of only specified users at the forest level.

If archiving is mission-critical in your organization, you can specify for Archiving Server to run in critical mode. In critical mode, Office Communications Server shuts down if IM cannot be archived (for example, if the Archiving service is temporarily unable to send a message to the database queue or insert a message into the database) or cannot be encrypted for archiving.

Note:
Archiving Server can archive all peer-to-peer IM content, including IM sent in the Group Chat client. However, actual chat room content is not archived by Archiving Server; to archive chat room content, use the compliance feature of Group Chat. For details, see Group Chat.