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Defining Your Requirements for Archiving

 

Topic Last Modified: 2011-02-03

If your organization must follow compliance regulations, you can deploy Archiving Server to enable archiving support for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 instant messaging (IM) and conferencing. To deploy Archiving Server, you need to decide how you want to implement it, including support for specific sites and users, criticality of archiving, purge settings, and management of archived data.

Before you deploy Archiving Server, you need to determine the following for your organization:

  • Which sites and users in your organization require archiving support.

  • Whether to enable archiving for internal communications (that is, communications between internal users), external communications (that is, communications that include at least one user outside your organization), or both.

  • Whether to enable archiving for both IM and conferencing sessions or only for IM sessions.

In addition, you also need to determine the specific policies and other support options that you want to implement, including the use of critical mode and how to manage the exporting and purging archived data.

Note

To enable you to delegate administrative tasks while maintaining your organization's security standards, Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software uses role-based access control (RBAC). With RBAC, administrative privilege is granted by assigning users to pre-defined administrative roles. To configure archiving policies and other archiving options, the user be assigned to the CsArchivingAdministrator role (unless the configuration is done directly on the Archiving Server, instead of remotely from another computer). For details about RBAC, see Role-Based Access Control in the Planning documentation. For a list of the user rights, permissions, and roles required for archiving deployment, see Archiving Deployment Overview, which is available in both the Planning documentation and the Deployment documentation.

Archiving Policies

You can control the scope of archiving support by using archiving policies and the configuration options for each policy. Archiving policies include the following:

  • Global archiving policy   By default, Lync Server 2010 creates a global archiving policy when you deploy Archiving Server. The global policy applies to all users and sites in your deployment. In the global policy, you specify whether to enable archiving of internal communications, external communications, or both.

    Important

    By default, neither archiving of internal communications nor archiving of external communications is enabled. The global policy cannot be deleted. If you try to delete it, the policy is reset to the default values.

  • Site archiving policy   You can enable or disable archiving support for specific sites. For example, to enable archiving support for a small number of sites, you can set the global archiving policy to not archive internal or external communications, and then create a site policy for each site for which you want to enable archiving support. As with the global policy, you specify in each site policy whether to enable archiving of internal communications, external communications, or both.

  • User archiving policy   You can enable or disable archiving support for specific users by assigning the policies to users that are defined in Users. For example, to disable archiving support for specific users at a site, you could set the global archiving policy to not archive internal or external communications, create a site policy for the site to enable archiving for the site, and then create a user policy that disables archiving support for the users. You could also not use a site policy at all, and use only user policies to enable archiving for specific users. As with the global policy and site policies, you specify in each user policy whether to enable archiving of internal communications, external communications, or both.

For each archiving policy in your deployment, you can specify whether to archive only IM sessions or to archive both IM and conferencing sessions.

If you create both site and user policies, user policies override site policies.

Note

Group instant messages and conferences are archived only if a user policy for at least one of the participants is configured to enable archiving.

Critical Mode

If archiving is mission-critical in your organization, you can specify that Archiving Server run in critical mode. In critical mode, Lync Server 2010 blocks specific functionality, if instant messages and conferencing content 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), both IM and conferencing functionality are blocked in the deployment until archiving support is restored.

  • If a conferencing user uploads a file, but the file cannot be copied to the archiving file store, conferencing functionality is blocked in the deployment until the problem is resolved, but IM functionality is not blocked.

The blocking of IM and conferencing does not affect any other Lync Server features and functionality, which should continue to operate as usual. By default, blocking of IM and conferencing sessions is not enabled.

Data Export

Using the session export tool provided in Lync Server 2010, you can create searchable transcripts of archived data. You can use the tool to do the following:

  • Create transcripts from archived data such as multi-part email messages (multi-part MIME formatted Outlook Express Electronic Mail (EML) format .eml file) that consists of the IM or conference transcript, the conference activity file (as an attachment), and uploaded conference files, including handouts (as attachments). You can create transcripts for all users or specific users.

  • Mark records that have been exported as safe to delete.

The session export tool creates one transcript for each completed communications session within the specified date range (between specified starting and ending dates). You run this tool using the Lync Server Export-CsArchivingData cmdlet. For an overview of the cmdlets you can use to manage Lync Server, see New Lync Server Management Shell in the Getting Started documentation.

Purge Mode

You can specify whether to purge the archives of data. If you enable purging of archiving data, you must specify one of the following options:

  • Purge both exported archiving data and stored archiving data after a specific number of days. The minimum number of days that you can specify is one day. The maximum number of days that you can specify is 2562 days. By default, purging is not enabled.

  • Purge exported archiving data only. This option purges all records that have been exported and marked as safe to delete by the session export tool.