1. Placing a Mailbox on Retention Hold
In Exchange 2010, when you place a mailbox on
retention hold the Mailbox Manager process stops processing the
retention policies or the managed folder mailbox policy that might
exist on that particular mailbox. End users can log on to their mailbox
as they normally would during a legal hold and send, delete, or change
emails. However, when the user searches her mailbox during a search,
she will not be able to find items that were older than the retention
time period because they are stored in the Purges folders of
Recoverable Items. You can configure to leave a comment when you place
a mailbox on retention hold. This comment will be displayed in
supported versions of Outlook.
You have two ways to set retention:
To place a mailbox on retention hold using the EMC,
expand the Recipient option on the left and select mailbox or mailboxes
that you would like to put on retention hold. In the Action panes,
click Properties and select the Mailbox Settings tab. Then select
Messaging Records Management and click Properties. In the Messaging
Records Management dialog, fill in the following fields:
Enable Retention Hold For Items In This Mailbox
Select this check box to place the mailbox on retention hold.
Start Date
Select this check box to enable a start date for
retention hold. Use the date and time controls below the check box to
set the start date and time.
End Date
Select this check box to enable an end date for
retention hold. Use the date and time controls below the check box to
set the start date and time.
You can also use PowerShell to place a mailbox on
retention hold. The following example places John Doe's mailbox on
retention hold:
Set-Mailbox "John Doe" -RetentionHoldEnabled $true
This example removes the retention hold from John Doe's mailbox:
Set-Mailbox "John Doe" -RetentionHoldEnabled $false
2. Litigation or Legal Hold
A litigation or legal hold is a process that an
organization uses to preserve all forms of relevant information when
litigation is reasonably anticipated. It basically prevents deletions
from happening and also preserves record changes to mailbox items in
both the user's primary mailbox and archive mailboxes. Retention hold
simply disables MRM policies whereas litigation hold keeps the policies
enabled but simply does not purge data and is either enabled or
disabled (that is, there are no time frames for litigation hold). What
is nice is that you can send alerts to the end users that their mailbox
data is on hold, which eliminates manually notifying users and telling
them that they can't delete data.
2.1. Placing a Mailbox on Litigation Hold
In Exchange 2010, when you place a mailbox on
litigation hold policies are still acted and applied upon but data is
never purged from the mailbox. End users can log on to their mailbox as
they normally would during a legal hold and send, delete, or change
emails. However, when the user searches her mailbox during a search,
she will not be able to find items that are older than the retention
time period.
Litigation hold can be set through PowerShell. The following example places John Doe's mailbox on a litigation hold:
Set-Mailbox [email protected] -LitigationHoldEnabled $true
This example removes the litigation hold from John Doe's mailbox:
Set-Mailbox [email protected] -LitigationHoldEnabled $false
