Online Archive

Office 365 is a cloud based solution which is managed by Microsoft. This article to enlighten the aspects of the Online Archive. The first question you would have to ask yourself, is where is the data located? Secondly, depending on the business industry, what compliance act are you following and is the Online Archive in line with it.

As the Microsoft Cloud services makes its way into the country, if you had provision before now, you may be in costing to move your items from internal locations to South Africa. Looking at the Online Archive solution, we have two options.

1. In-place Archive which comes default with selected licensing
2. Online Archive licenses which enables unlimited archive

To setup the In-Place Archive is quite simple:

1. Log onto the Portal.office.com
2. Sign in with the tenant admin account
3. Select the Users > Active users
4. Click on the user and on the right hand side a pane should open
5. Scroll to the bottom under the Exchange items to enable the in-place Archive

Method 2:

1. Log onto the Portal.office.com
2. Scroll to the bottom of the Admin Center till you locate the “Exchange Admin Center”
3. Click on it and you will be redirected
4. Locate the mailboxes
5. Click or select the user which you would like to enable the archive for
6. On the right hand side you have an option to enable In-Place Archive
7. Once enabled for the users, it will take some time for the folder to appear in the inbox.

NOTE: In order for Outlook to discover the changes, it requires the Autodiscover record to be in place and do a check in. Ensure all of those services are working. It will appear almost like another mailbox below your current mailbox.

For all the Powershell maniacs, here is some script lines for the enjoyment of provision via the shell:

Enabling Archive per User

Enable-Mailbox –Identity <user@domain.com> –Archive

To enable all mailboxes:

Get-Mailbox | Enable-Mailbox –Archive

Now you may have boardrooms, groups etc. and may not want to enable on those, therefore you need to filter out only user mailboxes.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq ‘UserMailbox’)} | Enable-Mailbox –Archive

Unlimited Archive

 

This method requires a license. Once the license has been assigned, this process does require the configurations to be done via Powershell. Lets begin:

1. Enable auto-expanding archiving for your entire organization

This allows the mailbox to auto expand. Remember, this archive solution is integrated with your mailbox.

Set-OrganizationConfig –AutoExpandingArchive

Enable auto-expanding archiving for selected users

 

To configure auto-expanding for selected users. Sometimes it could be company policies or based on licensing.

Enable-Mailbox <user@domain.com> -AutoExpandingArchive

Validation Process

Once a configuration is applied, we need to validate, right? Here is how we do this. To validate the above configuration at a domain level:

Get-OrganizationConfig | FL AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled

User Level

Get-Mailbox <user@domain.com> | FL AutoExpandingArchiveEnabled

NOTE: Another important factor thereafter, is the MRM policies which most admins over look this. In the upcoming article, we will go through the various policies and best practices.