The Archiving Server can archive all instant messaging (IM) conversations for all users or for individual users that you specify.

Messages from each Office Communications Server configured for archiving are sent over the Windows Server Message Queuing (also known as MSMQ) service to the Archiving Server, which uses a Microsoft SQL Server database to store archived information.

Although the archiving and call detail recording (CDR) agent is automatically installed on Front End Servers as part of the core Office Communications Server process, to archive IM traffic and call data you must configure the archiving and CDR agent and install the Archiving Server, to which the archiving and CDR agent connects. The Archiving Server consists of the following three components:

• Destination queue, which is managed by Message Queuing.
  
  
• Archiving Service component.
  
  
• Archiving back-end database.
  
  

The Archiving Service component can reside on the same computer as the archiving database or it can connect to a database on a different computer.

The Monitoring Server consists of the following three components:

• Destination queue, which is managed by Message Queuing.
  
  
• CDR and Quality of Experience (QoE) service components.
  
  
• The back-end databases, which consist of separate CDR and QoE databases that run in the same SQL Server instance.
  
  

Additionally, you can install SQL Server Reporting Services and the Monitoring Server Report Pack to view the reports that are included with Monitoring Server. And if you use System Center Operations Manager, you can configure alerts based on Monitoring Server data, to employ near real-time monitoring of media quality health state for network locations, Mediation Servers, and conferencing servers.