Immutability in Exchange

In this video we spend some time talking about an aspect of our archiving and compliance story for Exchange on-premises and the service. Specifically, if you do decide to take advantage of the simplicity and lower costs of co-locating your ‘archive’ data with your primary mailbox data, (see here for a previous discussion about why we think this approach is better, cheaper and simpler) do you have to give up on immutability?

The short answer is an emphatic no; not only do you get a great immutability story, but you get one that provides more finely-tuned control over the content that you decide to make immutable. The slightly longer answer about how this works and how Exchange provides built-in immutability policies that allows companies to comply with important regulations and internal is in the video. If you want more detailed whitepapers on the subject please see here.

You may have also seen that we recently released PST Capture – this is another step in putting your rogue .pst files onto Exchange where you can get control of them and start treating that data with the same immutability story.

It was suggested to me that I provide some more information on a few specific things I talk about in the video. So talking about Documents, I of course meant any email or attachment or other item that you happen to have stored in your Exchange Mailbox. Also, when I talk about ‘’Dumpster 2.0” that really is only the internal name for our retention hold functionality and ‘officially’ it is called the Recoverable Items Folder.

I also made a reference to copy-on-write - for those that are interested, copy-on-write is a term that references an approach to handling modifying content without destroying the original content and involves making a copy of an item before writing. In Exchange, when the user wants to modify a message or other piece of content that is marked for retention hold (immutable) the server first makes a copy of the message then moves the original to the Dum…The Recoverable Items Folder and then makes the modifications to the copy.

I'm always interested in any comments you have on Immutability, Archiving or other Exchange topics you want me to talk about.

- Perry