Craig Wiseman

Even if you're totally pure IBM/Domino/Websphere folks, this is a short page worth reviewing. In 2007 & 2010, Microsoft has been making some pretty good swings, chipping away at the server superiority that Domino has had for 10 years. There are some things here that should be straightforward to add to Domino, but aren't there (like treating a person's server-based archive as 100% part of the user mail experience). There are also some things that Domino doesn't do out of the box. But could.

1: Legal hold  Over the last several years, it has become increasingly more common for an organization’s email messages to be subpoenaed as part of the litigation process. The problem is that email is dynamic in nature. Messages are constantly being sent, received, and deleted. Likewise, messages in the archives are often set to expire after a specific length of time. All of these factors have made it difficult to comply with litigation-related message retention requirements.

Exchange 2010 offers a new legal hold feature. This feature allows you to preserve the contents of an Exchange mailbox. Users can still use their mailbox in the usual manner, but copies of all items are retained, even if they delete them or if archived content would otherwise have expired.

2: Multi mailbox search A complementary feature to legal hold is the new multi mailbox search feature. This feature makes it a lot easier for organizations to perform E-discovery. As the name implies, multi mailbox search allows a designated person to perform organization-level searches across users’ mailboxes. The search interface is designed to allow administrators to search for multiple keywords or phrases simultaneously.

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4: Database availability groups  Exchange 2007 provided several high availability features, such as Cluster Continuous Replication. Exchange 2010 takes things a step further with database availability groups. Database availability groups allow you to designate multiple servers to host copies of individual databases. In the event of a failure, Exchange can automatically recover. Databases are no longer server specific, so you are free to mix and match the database replicas that are hosted on each mailbox server.

5: Database-level failover  In previous Exchange Server cluster implementations, a failure required an entire cluster node to fail over. This meant that if a server was hosting multiple databases, and the disks associated with a single database were to fail, the entire server would have to fail over — which would be disruptive to users whose mailboxes weren’t even stored on the failed disks.

In contrast, Exchange 2010 supports database-level fail over. That way, if a failure affects only a single database, that database can fail over without disrupting the other databases on the server.

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8: Personal archive  In Exchange 2010, each user can now have two mailboxes — a primary mailbox and an archive mailbox. By using an archive mailbox, users can keep their primary mailboxes uncluttered. They’re free to browse their archive mailbox at will, and items can be automatically moved from their primary mailbox to their archive mailbox using retention policies.

9: Retention policies  Retention policies allow messages to be tagged in a way that reflects their useful lifespan and what should happen when they expire. For example, you could specify that items in one folder should be deleted after 30 days, while items in another folder should be moved to the archives after five years. Users can also apply retention policies to individual messages that are separate from folder-level policies.

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