Overview Robert's Rules of Exchange is a series of blog posts in which we take a fictitious company, describe their existing Exchange implementation, and then walk you through the de...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
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@Justin.G11: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979795.aspx allow you to keep primary mailboxes smaller and move
older, less-frequently accessed email to an archive mailbox which can be accessed transparently using Outlook 2010 (and now) Outlook 2007, or using Outlook Web App (OWA) from any computer using any browser.
At first look, it's easy to dismiss the archive as "just another mailbox", and the idea of dumping everything in a single mailbox indeed seems very attractive. However, when a database grows too large, you partition it. This is what Exchange 2010 does, and
the older, less frequently accessed partition (the archive mailbox) can either reside on the same mailbox database, or another
MDB on the same or another Exchange 2010 SP1 Mailbox server, or in the cloud with
http://office365.microsoft.com/en-US/online-services.aspx. This partition, which for most users is likely to be larger than their primary mailbox and mostly consist of
older, less-frequently accessed items, isn't synced locally to the user's computer even with Outlook 2010/2007 in
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/about-cached-exchange-mode-HP001000067.aspx.
Whether the archive is stored in a separate (non-Exchange) database, as many products do, or within Exchange as "just another mailbox", the data still resides in a database. With the Exchange 2010 archive, it resides in the Exchange
database. It offers less management overhead, a single management interface (managing archive mailboxes is no different than managing primary mailbox, and it doesn't introduce another type of database to be managed), helps you reduce or eliminate the risks
from PST files, and lowers the costs of e-discovery (using
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335072.aspx), should your organization need to.
The user isn't managing multiple mailboxes — once provisioned, the archive appears automatically in Outlook and
OWA, and mail can be moved automatically to the archive using
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd297955.aspx, or manually by users (drag-n-drop,
cut-and-paste, Inbox rules). For users, the archive offers the benefits of PST files, minus the file management and storage overhead of PSTs.
Of course, (leaving all mail in) a single, larger primary mailbox can also be a perfectly acceptable solution if it meets your organization's requirements.