Exchange Server 2007 : Use Managed Content Settings

Grasp the Meaning of Managed Content Settings

The umbrella that this topic comes under is Messaging Records Management (MRM), which is another acronym relating to working with messages when they are at rest—that is, they are sitting somewhere, not flying around your network. They are in an Inbox, Deleted Items, a custom folder, but they are sitting and have been sitting, perhaps for some time.

So, what does a user have in his mailbox? He has default folders (Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, and so on). He might have custom folders (you will soon learn how to create custom folders for all users through policy application). All those folders hold messages that might include emails, voicemails or faxes. Certainly these are included if you use the UM features in Exchange 2007. Will Journal, RSS, and Task Items be included? Perhaps, you might be surprised at the various items in a user’s mailbox that are all at rest, taking up storage space, and are most likely never to be accessed again in the majority of cases.

Managed content settings help in the following ways:

• Establish rules to move content

• Establish rules to journal content

• Establish rules to purge content

• Use a mixture of the preceding to move, journal, and purge content

It sounds a bit overwhelming. However, consider a situation in which your users delete content, but it goes into their Deleted Items folder. Therefore, it is still in their mailboxes and still part of their storage spaces. You can create a policy that purges the data in their Deleted Items folder automatically after a period of time.

A buildup of voicemail in a user’s Inbox can be handled by moving those items from the Inbox to a custom folder with the understanding that after 30, 60, or 90 days, they will be purged (giving your users the opportunity to move them elsewhere if they are important).

There are several uses for this technology to ensure that the data is protected while the storage is preserved. Let’s consider the steps to creating a policy.

The Process of Managed Folders and Policy Creation and Application

To begin with, open your EMC, expand the Organization Configuration, and select Mailbox. Note the three remaining tabs that we haven’t discussed in this chapter:

• Managed Default Folders

• Managed Custom Folders

• Managed Folder Mailbox Policies

Note that these tabs are empty with the exception of Managed Default Folders. That includes all the standard folders that a user would have.

Each instance of a folder has managed content settings attached. If you select the Inbox or the Deleted Items folder, in the Actions pane you see the option New Managed Content Settings. It is here that you can define a set of criteria that can be added later on to a policy.

You might find it odd that there is an option in the Actions pane called New Managed Default Folder. This is not going to create additional copies of the default folders (in other words, you cannot create two Inboxes for a user); it creates additional instances that can then have additional managed content settings.

Ultimately, you put a policy together and you place those custom folders and managed default folder instances together under a policy that you apply to a user. You can apply only one policy per user, so you might want to have different instances and managed content settings to create different policies for different users. It can easily become complicated if you let it.

You can create a custom folder without any additional settings simply to have a special folder, perhaps for users to use for certain items. You might also create a voicemail folder that users can create rules to put their voicemails in. Then again, you can create managed content settings that apply rules over those voicemails past a certain timeframe. It’s up to you.

The process for creating managed content settings is as follows:

Let’s break this down into the steps.

Create New Managed Default Folders

To begin with, determine which folder you want to create another instance of. You can use the folders that currently exist to establish managed content settings on, but it might be better to create instances to stay organized. To do this, follow these steps:

Create New Managed Content Settings

Now that you have a default folder to apply settings to, you want to create managed content settings over that folder. To do this, perform the following:

1.	Open the EMC.
2.	From the Navigation Tree, expand the Organization Configuration work center.
3.	Select Mailbox and then select Managed Default Folders.
4.	Locate the instance of the default folder to which you want to apply settings. Right-click the folder, or from the Actions pane, select the New Managed Content Setting link to open the wizard.
5.	On the Introduction screen shown in Figure 1, you are told that the settings allow you to control the lifespan of items of the specified message type. First, you have to provide a name for the managed content settings. Figure 1. The New Managed Content Settings Introduction screen.
6.	Select the down arrow to choose a message type. You can leave the default All Mailbox Content or select other types.
7.	Select the checkbox Length of Retention Period (Days) and provide the number of days the items can reside within the folder before action is taken.
8.	Under Retention Period Starts, you can select one of the following: When Delivered, End Date for Calendar and Recurring Tasks When Item Is Moved to the Folder
9.	Then choose Action to take at the end of the retention period, which can be one of the following: Move to the Deleted Items Folder Move to a Managed Custom Folder Delete and Allow Recovery Permanently Delete Mark as Past Retention Limit
10.	If you chose Move to a Managed Custom Folder, you can select Browse and locate the folder. After all answers are provided, click Next.
11.	On the Journaling screen, you can use journaling to automatically forward a copy of an item of the specified message type to another location. To do this, click Forward Copies To, and then choose an email address. Then in the Assign the Following Label to the Copy of the Message dialog, write your message. You can select the Outlook Message Format (.msg) or the Exchange MAPI Message Format (TNEF). When you finish, click Next.
12.	Confirm the Configuration Summary, and then click New.
13.	When complete, click Finish.
14.	Notice that now, beneath your folder, you have the managed content settings that you can alter by going into the Properties.

Create a New Managed Custom Folder

If you want to create a new managed custom folder that can also be deployed through a policy or in harmony with content settings that you establish for a default folder, perform the following:

1.	Open the EMC.
2.	From the Navigation Tree, expand the Organization Configuration work center.
3.	Select Mailbox and then select Managed Custom Folders.
4.	From the Actions pane, choose the New Managed Custom Folder link to open the wizard.
5.	You have one screen with information you need to fill out, as you can see in Figure 2. Input the information in the following fields: Name Display the Following Name When the Folder Is Viewed in Office Outlook Checkbox: Storage Limit (KB) for This Folder and Its Subfolders Display the Following Comment When the Folder Is Viewed in Outlook Checkbox: Do Not Allow Users to Minimize This Comment in Outlook Figure 2. The New Managed Custom Folder screen.
6.	After all information is entered, click New.
7.	When complete, click Finish.

At this point, you can simply add the custom folder to the mailbox policy and it will appear in those recipients’ mailboxes, or you can use that folder in folder settings from your default folders. However, you can also select the custom folder and, from the Actions pane, create new managed content settings for that folder. It is completely up to you and the needs you have for your organization and your users.

Create a Managed Folder Mailbox Policy

After you have the default and custom folders you need and all of the managed content settings you require, it is time to create policies. Note that although you can create many policies, in the end you can apply only one policy per user. The goal is to ensure that the one policy includes everything you need.

To create a managed folder mailbox policy, perform the following:

You can go into the properties of the policy to add or remove certain folders. You can always go back to the settings of certain folders to make changes to those settings, too.

Applying a Folder Policy to a Recipient

Many ways to apply a policy to a recipient exist. One way is during the creation of the mailbox account itself. During the Mailbox Settings configuration, you are asked if you want to apply a managed folder mailbox policy, and you can click Browse to choose the policy.

If you already created a recipient and want to make changes to the policy you selected or add a policy, you would enter the properties for the user and go to the Mailbox Settings tab. Select the Messaging Records Management option and enter the properties. Then you can select a folder policy for the recipient.

However, it might be easier to use the EMS to accomplish this task. You can use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet for a user:

Set-Mailbox -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy “name of policy here”

Now you can use this cmdlet with an individual mailbox. Imagine you had a mailbox for Joel User and the policy was called Executive Policy. You would type:

Set-Mailbox "JoelUser" -ManagedFolderMailboxPolicy "Executive Policy"

However, if you want to really enforce in bulk, you would probably want to try and apply policies to larger groups, such as distribution groups.

You might first use the Get-DistributionGroupMember cmdlet, or the Get-Mailbox cmdlet if you know the parameters you are looking for, and then pipeline the results (using the | for the pipeline) with the Set-Mailbox cmdlet using the -Managed FolderMailboxPolicy setting.

The Managed Folder Assistant

There is one more step in this. You have to actually configure the mailbox server(s) to schedule and run the managed folder assistant. If this assistant doesn’t run, nothing happens. No custom folders are created and no policy settings are enforced.

To ensure the Managed Folder Assistant is running, perform the following: