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Overview of Archiving

 

Topic Last Modified: 2011-01-31

Corporations and other organizations are subject to an increasing number of industry and government regulations that require the retention of specific types of communications. With the Archiving Server feature, Microsoft Lync Server 2010 provides a way for you to archive instant messaging (IM) content, conferencing (meeting) content, or both that is sent through Lync Server 2010.

If you deploy Archiving Server and associate it with Front End pools, you can set it to archive instant messages and conferences and specify the users for which archiving is enabled. When you deploy Archiving Server, a global policy is created by default. You can use the global policy to enable archiving of internal communications (that is, communications between internal users) and external communications (that is, communications that include at least one non-internal user). You can also specify the users for whom archiving is enabled by creating policies for specific users or sites. If archiving is enabled, the instant messages from all multiparty conferences involving users can also archived, even if you have set Archiving Server to archive the messages of only specified users and sites.

The following types of content are archived:

  • Peer-to-peer instant messages

  • Multiparty instant messages

  • Conference content, including uploaded content (for example, handouts) and event-related content (for example, joining, leaving, uploading sharing, and changes in visibility)

The following types of content are not archived:

  • Peer-to-peer file transfers

  • Audio/video for peer-to-peer instant messages and conferences

  • Application sharing for peer-to-peer instant messages and conferences

  • Conferencing annotations and polls

To configure archiving, you need to specify the following:

  • The scope of archiving support required in your organization, including which policies are required for specific sites and users and whether archiving is to be enabled for internal communications, external communications, or both, in addition to which workloads are to be archived.

  • Whether to run Lync Server 2010 in critical mode, which blocks IM or conferencing sessions if archiving fails.

  • How archived data is to be managed. The archiving database is not intended for long-term retention and Lync Server 2010 does not provide an e-discovery (search) solution for archived data, so data needs to be moved to other storage. Lync Server 2010 does provide a session export tool that you can use to export archived data, creating searchable transcripts of the archived data.

  • Whether to enable purging of archived data and, if so, how to implement purging.

For details about these options, see Defining Your Requirements for Archiving.

If you enable archiving in one Front End pool or Standard Edition server, you should then enable it for all other Front End pools and Standard Edition servers in your deployment. You need to do this because users whose communications are required to be archived can be invited to a group IM conversation or meetings hosted on a different pool. If archiving is not enabled on the pool where the conversation or meeting is hosted, the session cannot be archived.