6. Implementing a Retention Policy for Exchange in the Compliance Center
All right? So in the Exchange Classic Center that’s been around for a very long time, microsoft used what was known as retention tags and policies to implement retention settings and it was really just for Exchange. Now over the course of time, microsoft has now decided to move that into the Compliance Center. And that’s the way they want you to do it now. Okay? So I’m going to go to portal Microsoft. com, I’m going to click Show All. We’re going to go to the Compliance Center and we will go down here to where it says Information Governance. All right? And we’re going to just go here and click Label Policies. And we’ll just use some of the existing labels we’ve got here.
We’re going to say publish a label. All right, choose a label to publish. Why don’t we do ten year and seven year no, ten year and five year and we’ll add that and we’ll click next those two labels and we’re going to choose just Exchange this time. All right? And so from there we can also add certain recipients that we want this to apply to certain individuals we want this to go to if we want and just apply it to those individuals. Now keep in mind if you don’t have a very big organization, in my case, I’ve got this and I’ve got a test group that I’ve created, I could apply it to that if I want. But in a bigger organization, obviously you’ll have a bunch more people that you can add this to.
So from there I’m going to go ahead now and I’m going to click next and we’re just going to give this a name. I’m going to call this Exchange Retention Policy for lack of a better name. And we’ll click next and we’re going to click to Submit and it’s now officially applied. Okay, well, when I say that, as always, it can take anywhere from an hour to 24 hours before this actually becomes available. So don’t jump right into Outlook and start looking for it because, because it can take some time. All right? But it’s that easy actually. And you just kind of putting everything together, creating the labels that we’ve already seen and then creating the policy.
7. Assigning Exchange Retention Policies in Outlook
Now, after we have gone through the process of setting up retention policies for exchange, we should now be able to go into Outlook and see those labels activated. Keep in mind that you do need to make sure you’ve waited some time to do this. It could be an hour. It could be 24 hours. In my case, it only took about an hour. So I’m going to go right here, and I’m going to click the little waffle symbol here, and I am going to go to Outlook. So we’ll open up Outlook, all right? And let’s just click on email. All right, we’ve got an email open.
So we’re going to click this little ellipse symbol here. We’re going to go down to where it says, advanced Actions Assign Policy. And as you can see, we have retention labels available to us based on the policies that we’ve set. So if I wanted to do five year delete, we can just flag this sucker as five year delete. And there you go. You’ll see the label right there? And that just basically proves that it is working. And we are able to get our retention labels within our email now. Okay.
8. Applying mailbox holds in Microsoft Exchange
So one of the things that we have to consider in our environment is situations where we might need to recover someone’s mailbox, or someone’s email in a situation perhaps that involves litigation. Imagine if you had a situation where you had an employee that was doing some mischievous activities with their email, and this person was suspected of doing something that might involve litigation, going to court, whatever. Or maybe this person just is in an important job role where we need to make sure we have a complete backup of all of their data, even in a situation where they attempt to maybe permanently delete that data. So imagine you got a user who’s been exchanging emails. The user goes and deletes the emails.
The emails, of course, they go into recovery for 30 days. You can tell it to delete that, and admins can do what’s called a soft recovery for 14 days after that, but then after that, it’s permanently deleted, it’s purged. What would you do in a situation where you had a legal scenario come up where there was some emails that were exchanged back and forth, and we need to be able to recover those emails and take this to court or whatever for forensics purposes, for litigation. So we have to consider what is called a litigation hold. And I would also like to add there’s two main kinds of hold. There’s two kinds of holds with exchange.
There’s what’s called a litigation hold, where you can basically put a hold on somebody’s mailbox and all their email in, which I could say, let’s say I put a litigation hold on to it for a year. Even if they try to permanently delete their emails, I can recover it. Even if a mailbox gets deleted, I can recover the whole mailbox as an exchange administrator. So that’s called a litigation hold. And make sure you understand that concept. And then there’s also what is known as retention hold. A retention hold involves retention labels. Imagine a situation where you have a retention label that’s set to seven days, and you have an employee I didn’t say seven years, I said seven days.
You have an employee that goes on vacation for let’s say, a week, seven days. So then that employee gets a bunch of emails in, and those emails get flagged. Let’s say with a seven day retention label, when the person gets back from vacation, the emails have been deleted. And I know that’s kind of a crazy idea. Seven days, it could be longer than that. What if it’s a month and a person is on maternity leave, you have somebody in the office that’s pregnant, has the baby, comes back after three months and their emails are gone. So what we can do, we can do what’s called a retention hold, which will make it where their emails don’t get deleted for a certain amount of time. So one is, litigation holds are for legal purposes.
Retention holds are for the purpose of making sure that information doesn’t get deleted for retention reasons. Now, litigation holds can be done using the Admin Center graphically, but retention holds. As of right now, you can only use PowerShell to activate those. Let’s go right in and take a look at litigation holds. So here we are on portal Microsoft. com. We’re going to click show all. We’re going to go down to the Exchange Admin Center, and it depends on your tenant. You may start out in the classic portal. You may go straight into the new Exchange Admin portal. You want to be in the new exchange admin portal? So if you don’t start out there, then make sure you click that.
But in newer tenants, a lot of times you’re going to start right out in this new Exchange Admin Center because they’re going to eventually phase out the classic. So here we are on exchange admin center. We’re just going to click on mailboxes and we’re going to click on the mailbox in my case, John Christopher. And once we take a look at that mailbox, if you look right over here, you’ll see more actions. You can say manage litigation hold. That point, I can turn that on. All right. I can specify how many days I want to do this. Perhaps I’m going to do it for 365 days.
I can specify a note so the user knows. You’ll notice there’s an option that says web page with more information for user or user. You could have a link for the user that they could click. And then at that point, all you got to do is click Save. And you’ve now enabled a litigation hold. So anything that they delete is not actually going to get deleted for 365 days. Even their mailbox is not going to get deleted for 365 days. If you take away their license or whatever, microsoft 365 is not going to get rid of their mailbox. So this is going of course, how you would do it using the graphical tool.
9. Using PowerShell to enable Litigation and Retention Holds on Microsoft Exchange
Now you can also use PowerShell for activating Litigation hold as well as this is really the only way you can do a retention hold on somebody’s mailbox. Now the first thing you got to think about here is that you got to make sure you have installed the Exchange Online Management. All right? And of course you can type if you haven’t already, already done that it’s install module and then Exchange Online Management. This should have already been done. If you’ve got the Exchange command that’s installed, then you’re good to go there. And then the next thing you need to do is import that module once it’s installed so you can say Import module and then Exchange. Let me type that out fully. Exchange online management.
Okay, so you’re just going to type that out, import Module, change Online Management. We’re going to hit enter. So we’ve got the Exchange commands here and then the next thing we got to do is connect to Exchange Online. So we’re going to say connect, exchange online and hit enter. And you’re going to get a little pop up where you’ve got to authenticate. So I’m going to go ahead and authenticate to my account here and it should begin importing all the Exchange commands and will allow me to get access to my account. I can then just check to see if I’ve got my commands. I can say get mailbox identity I’m going to say Jc@examlabpractice. com and just make sure that it shows up and it does.
So I’m officially connected and I can see the mailbox. Okay? So if I wanted to do a litigation hold on a user, I can say Set Mailbox Identity and then we’ll say Jc@examlabpractice. com. We’re then going to say Litigation Holdenabled and we’re going to say Dollar sign true, which is going to indicate that you want to turn that on and then you’re going to say Litigation duration. And we would do 365 days. Okay? And that basically is going to do the same thing as doing this through the graphical tool. At that point you will notice that it has a warning message. It says the hold setting may take up to 240 minutes to take effect. So yeah, it is going to take a few hours before it’s completely and utterly activated.
And so you have to give it some time. Like many other things in the Microsoft 365 services, you gotta, you got to wait, as I like to call it. Hurry up and wait. All right. Now the next thing I want to show you is if I want, I can look at the mailbox and I can see if it’s fully activated with Litigation Hold. And I can do that by typing get mailbox identityjc@examlabpractice. com. And then I’m going to basically pipe that over to this command called Select Object, which means I want to see some specific information about that mailbox. All right? And the information I want to see is the display name all right. Comma litigation hold enabled. Comma litigation duration. So litigation hold enabled. Comma litigation duration. We’ll hit enter on that. And as you can see, it is saying that it is enabled. It did not show me a duration.
That’s probably because it’s still processing, but that’s okay. It is officially enabled. So we’re good to go there. All right, now what I want to show you is how to activate retention hold. All right? And again, as of right now, the only way you can do a retention hold is using Power Shell. They will probably eventually add a graphical way to do this, but as of right now, they don’t have that. So to do a retention hold, we’re going to say set mailboxidentityjc@examlabpractice. com, and then we’re going to say retention. Let’s try this again. Retention. Hold enabled there we go. It took me a few tries to get that. There it is. Retention hold enabled. And I’m just going to set that to true, and I’m going to hit enter.
Okay, that takes just a moment to activate. And at that point, we can go right here and we can say git mailbox identityjc@examlabpractice. com. And then we’re just going to put let’s just say format as a list, show it to me as a list. And I want to see just information on retention hold. So notice I’m using Wildcards there. It’s just going to show me anything that involves the word retention hold about that mailbox. And there you go. Retention hold is officially enabled. Okay, all right. You can also set a time limit and all that on there as well. All right, but I’ve now enabled retention hold as well as litigation hold on my mailbox box. And that’s how you do it through Power Shell.
10. Implementing Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving Policies
Now one of the cool features with Microsoft Exchange that users get access to is this thing called the Archive Mailbox. The Archive Mailbox is something a user can use when they want to move email out of their inbox. And well, as you probably are aware, you only get so much space with an Exchange Online account for your user. And once a user fills up that space, they got to do something. They got to start deleting stuff. But what if they got a bunch of stuff that they don’t want to delete, but they also don’t necessarily need it sitting in their inbox and they like to move it away from their mailbox so it’s not taking up space. This is what the Archive Mailbox can do.
Now the Archive Mailbox is actually set up for a user and stored in a different area of Microsoft Data Centers. It’s not stored on the highest performance equipment. So sometimes getting access to your Archive data can be a little bit sluggish. But the general idea is that if you’re looking at this from the standpoint of I don’t really need access to these emails at every moment of the day and super frequently, then the archived mailbox is perfect for you. Okay? Now first thing I want to show you is that when it comes to retention and all of that with the Archive Mailbox is that users don’t have the Archive Mailbox enabled. So let me show you where that’s at.
If we go to portal Microsoft. com, click Show All, we’re going to go to a Compliance Center and from there we’re going to go to Information Governance. Click on Information Governance, we’re going to click the little Archive tab right here and you’ll see your accounts will show up here any accounts that have access to the license for Exchange. So we have to kind of wait on that to show up. But you’ll notice that right now I have it, but the Archive Mailbox is not enabled. Now I want to show you that before we enable it, it’s important to understand the licensing requirements for having this. Okay? Not all licenses with Exchange online give you the archive mailbox feature.
Quick way to do that. I always love to pull up the Microsoft documents and I want to encourage you to get in the habit of doing that. If we go to Google and just do a quick search on Exchange Online Archiving, there is an article right here, exchange Online Archiving service Description. If we click on that and scroll down, you can see what the latest licenses are. You’ll see that it does come with most Exchange Online. Most of the office licenses and Exchange Online licenses do have the Archive Mailbox. So chances are you’ll probably have it. But it’s always good to check. The next thing we need to do is we need to turn this on.
Okay? So we’re going to go to Portal Microsoft. com and we’re going to click Show All. We’re going to click Exchange and I’m going to do this from the new Exchange Admin Center. You may start out in the Classic. If you do, just click New. If you have a newer tenant, you may start out in the new Exchange Admin Center right out of the gate so you’re fine. So once you get there, you’re going to click on under Recipients. You’re going to go to Mailboxes. You’re going to click on the person that you want to do this for. You’re going to click that and then at that point I can go right down here and you’ll see under More Actions, you’ll see an option that says Manage Mailbox Archive.
Okay? So I’m going to go ahead and click that and you’ll notice that it’s turned off. I can turn that on and it’ll tell you unlimited stores or premium feature requires to change online p two. Okay, so for unlimited stores are just warning you about that. You can also click Learn More to see more information on that. This is exactly what I wanted to show you. You can turn it on right here. By the way, you can do this through PowerShell using the Set Mailbox command if you wanted to activate this in PowerShell. But I’m going to go ahead and click Save. Okay? So it says that it’s been updated successfully. So we should be able to close out of this.
All right? And then if we go back over to Compliance Microsoft. com, we should be able to pull up the information governance area and click on Archive and notice that the archive is now set to enable. So that just confirms that we’ve officially got our archive mailbox turned on. Okay, so where do we create an archive policy at? So you’re going to do an archive policy inside of Exchange. You’re not going to use the information governance at the moment to do that, although eventually they are going to move that over. We’re going to go over to Portal Microsoft. com, we’re going to click the Show All lip symbol and we’re going to click Exchange.
So if you go in here and you need to be in the Classic, which is what I’m in right here, if you’re in the new Exchange Admin Center, just tell it to switch over to the Classic. Then we’re going to click on Compliance Management. We’re going to go over to retention tags and we’re going to create a new retention tag and we’ll just say for personal and this is where we are going to do it, all right? So we’re going to say Archive in 100 days, all right? And we’re going to say Move to Archive. We’re going to set the days to 100. We’re going to click Save and we’ve now created our little tag. We’re going to jump over now to retention policies. We’re going to apply it to the default policy here. So we’re going to go ahead and edit that.
Keep in mind, sometimes it can take a while for it to officially update, so you got to be patient. I’m going to click the plus sign, all right? And there’s the archive for 100 days. We’re going to add that. We’re going to click. OK. Click. Save. And there we go. All right. Again, just a forewarning. Don’t expect this to show up in Outlook very quickly. The ability to archive and all all that. It does take some time before it’s going to show up. And you also need to make sure this policy tag is a policy is applied. Give it an hour before even trying to find archive mailbox and all that, and then eventually it will show up into an Outlook, all right? And so that is how you can work with retention policies involving archive.
