Haiku #53

Your words still linger

Long after you have left us.

CS Archiving.

The author of today's haiku once read that, when Albert Einstein was teaching at Princeton, university officials would come in after each class, take down the blackboard he used, shellac it, and then save it, just in case Einstein had come up with something truly momentous. To be honest, the author doesn't know if Princeton officials really did do that or not, but he likes to think that they did: that seems like the perfect example of the importance of preserving the written word.

Note. Incidentally, each morning after he's finished the daily haiku, Microsoft officials come in, take his computer, shellac it, and then save it, just in case that day's haiku was something truly momentous. The author keeps offering to send these officials a copy of the haiku as a .doc file, but, well, you know Microsoft.

The truth is, sometimes it's nice to preserve the written word; after all, there's always a chance that you've scribbled down a way to carry out cold fusion, an equation that proves that time travel is possible, or an idea for a new flavor of Doritos.

Note. Of course, Doritos may have already come in every possible flavor. You're no doubt already familiar with Toasted Corn Doritos, Taco-Flavored Doritos, Cool Doritos, and Nacho Cheese Doritos. However, there are, or at least have been, Hot Wings/Blue Cheese Doritos, Zesty Taco/Chipotle Ranch Doritos, Habañero/Guacamole Doritos, Cheesy Enchilada/Sour Cream Doritos, and Pizza Cravers/Ranch Doritos, not to mention cheeseburger-flavored Doritos, Mountain Dew-flavored Doritos, and Fiery Buffalo Doritos.

And yes, as a matter of fact, Fiery Buffalo Doritos were invented by Albert Einstein.

Or so we once read.

But while sometimes it might be nice to preserve the written word, in other cases, it's absolutely imperative that you preserve the written word. For example, in the world of finance, it's often required that organizations save copies of all their electronic communications, including instant messages and online conference transcripts. And how do you save copies of your Lync Server 2010 instant messages and online conference transcripts? Hey, how should we know? Who do we look like, Albert Einstein?

Note. OK, early in the morning, sure. But after we've had a shower and a cup of coffee, no.

Besides, we're just kidding around. We know exactly how you save copies of your Lync Server 2010 instant messages and online conference transcripts: by setting up an Archiving server and implementing Lync Server archiving.

Needless to say, we aren't going to detail the process of setting up an Archiving server, at least not today; you can find that sort of information in our Lync Server deployment guide. (Einstein: "There's no need to memorize anything that you can find written down in a book.") We will, however, note that simply setting up an Archiving server doesn't mean that you'll magically have an archive of all your instant messages and online conference transcripts. Instead, you need to do two more things before archiving actually takes place:

· You need to enable archiving at the global scope, and/or at the site scope.

· You need to assign an archiving policy that specifies what it is you're going to archive.

Step 2 (the archiving policy) is the subject of today's haiku. (See? We always get to the subject of the day's haiku, sooner or later.) As we noted, setting up an Archiving server doesn't cause instant messages and conference transcripts to be archived. Even enabling archiving doesn't cause instant messages and conference transcripts to be archived; doing that simply makes it possible for things to be archived. To actually start storing instant messages and conference transcripts in your archiving database you need to create/modify and then assign the appropriate archiving policy. These policies can easily be managed using the CsArchivingPolicy cmdlets: Get-CsArchivingPolicy, New-CsArchivingPolicy, Grant-CsArchivingPolicy, Remove-CsArchivingPolicy, and Set-CsArchivingPolicy.

For example, suppose you want to archive instant messages and conference transcripts for all your users. The easiest way to do that is to enable archiving in the global archiving policy. In order to do that, you use a command similar to this:

Set-CsArchivingPolicy –Identity global –ArchiveExternal $True –ArchiveInternal $True

As you can see there are two options available to you. If you set ArchiveExternal to True (the default value is False), then all your "external" communication sessions will be archived.

Note. What's an "external" communication session? Good question. An external IM session is one in which at least one of the participants is an unauthenticated user who does not have an Active Directory account within your organization.

And no, we don't mind these questions; as Einstein once said, "The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

Well, actually, we're not totally sure what that means, either. We were going to ask, but we were afraid people would think that was a dumb question.

And if you set ArchiveInternal to True (again, the default value is False), then all your "internal" communication sessions will be archived. Before you ask, an internal session is one in which all the participants are authenticated users who have Active Directory accounts within your organization.

That's really all there is to it. Archiving policies can be set at the site scope or the per-user scope as well as the global scope; that makes it easy to ensure that instant messages and conference transcripts for certain select users are archived while those same items are not archived for other users. For example, these two commands create a new per-user archiving policy and then assign that policy to all the users in the Finance department:

New-CsArchivingPolicy –Identity "FinanceArchiving" –ArchiveExternal $True –ArchiveInternal $True

Get-CsUser –LdapFilter "Department=Finance" | Grant-CsArchivingPolicy –PolicyName "FinanceArchiving"

Etc., etc.

That's if for today. We'd like to finish things off by once more quoting from the immortal Albert Einstein: "A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others."

Note. Sorry, but we have no idea what that means, either. As far as we know, a mimosa is either a tropical shrub, or a drink made with champagne and orange juice; to be honest, knowing that didn't really help us when we tried to make some sense out of that quote. We'll sit down at the blackboard and try to figure this one out. If we do, we'll make shellacked copies of the blackboard and send one out to each of you.