Office 365 Beta: Completing provisioning of archive in the cloud from your on-premises Exchange 2010 server

[bsuneja]

In Exchange 2010, we introduced Personal Archives, an email archiving feature intended to allow you to reduce or eliminate PST files by provisioning archive mailboxes for your users. For more details, see Understanding Personal Archives in Exchange 2010 documentation.

In Exchange 2010 RTM, you can provision a user's archive mailbox on the same mailbox database (MDB) as the user's primary mailbox. In Exchange 2010 SP1, you can also create the archive mailbox on a different MDB located on the same Mailbox server as the user's primary mailbox, or on another Mailbox server. Using mailbox move requests, you can also move archive mailboxes independently of the primary mailbox.

With Office 365 beta, we also enabled organizations to store archive mailboxes in the cloud, while maintaining the primary mailbox on your on-premises Mailbox servers running Exchange 2010 SP1. Users can seamlessly access their primary on-premises mailbox and their archive in the cloud using Outlook 2010, Outlook 2007 and Outlook Web App (OWA).

Figure 1: Provisioning an archive in the cloud for a user with an on-premises mailbox.

To enable archive in the cloud, your organization must be enrolled in and setup for Office 365 beta (you can sign up for the beta here). (This post is not intended to cover all the rich co-existence scenarios made possible with Office 365 and on-premises Exchange deployments.)

Office 365 beta and cloud-based archive state

When provisioning an archive in the cloud for a user with a primary mailbox on-premises, the archive mailbox provisioning status in the Exchange Management Console (EMC) changes to Cloud-based archive pending. After the cloud-based archive's created (in Office 365), the archive status is not automatically updated in EMC. Additionally, Outlook and OWA do not detect and load the archive mailbox.

Update 05/11/2011: The archive status is now automatically updated in the EMC and you're not required to use this workaround or the ChangeArchiveStatus.ps1 script.

Figure 2: After provisioning an archive in the cloud, the user's archive state shows as Cloud-based archive pending in the EMC (and the Shell).

The workaround

Here's a workaround to manually update the archive provisioning status in your on-premises organization using the ChangeArchiveStatus.ps1 script (download it, it is attached to this blog post).

Note: It's a temporary workaround required for the Office 365 beta — it'll not be required for Office 365 GA.

1. Provision an archive mailbox in the cloud using the EMC or the Shell on-premises
2. Wait for the DirSync cyle to complete (this may take up to 2 hours)
3. Confirm that the archive has been provisioned in Office 365. This step requires your organization's Office 365 account credentials.
   1. Use the Shell to connect to Office 365. For details on how to do this, see Connect Windows PowerShell to Outlook Live.
   2. Run Get-MailUser | fl ArchiveStatus and check if the value of the ArchiveStatus property is set to active.

Important: Do not perform the following steps until the archive status in Office 365 changes to active.

1. Using a Shell session to an on-premises Exchange server, run the ChangeArchiveStatus.ps1 script using the following syntax:

   ChangeArchiveStatus.ps1 $true

2. Refresh the EMC and verify that the user's archive status is now active.

Bharat Suneja 

Update 1/11/2011: Command to check archive status in cloud updated to Get-MailUser.

ChangeArchiveStatus.zip

[#2]

Will a managed mailbox policy prohibit this functionality, I wonder...

[#3]

@Mike Gustat: You'll need to pick one or the other.  Personal Archives use retention policies and tags vs. these mailbox policies.  You'll have to uncheck the box on mailbox settings for this if you'd like an archive for a user.

[#4]

What sort of bandwidth usage would be typical for a user with say a 2gb archive?

[#5]

Hi,
Thanks for the great article. However I have a question for you.
I created user mailbox and archive mailbox both on the same MDB. I dirsync the use and assign a license to the user. When I migrate just the archive mailbox using EMC  to the cloud , archive mailbox shows up as a mail enable user instead of a mailbox enabled user and when I access to Owa it errors out there is not mailbox for this user. But if Ido a remote move mailbox for both archive and mailbox to the cloud , I can access owa and user is set as a mailbox enabled user. Please advise!

[#6]

@Mike: As Ankur suggests, you'll need to pick one or the other. You can't archive-enable mailboxes that have a Managed Folder policy assigned. You can use Retention Policies, the MRM feature introduced in Exchange 2010.

[#7]

I have an on-premises user with a hosted archive. The archive status is active, the script set the on-premises archive status to 1, but the archive mailbox still won't connect. In OWA, the archive mailbox shows in the folder list but when I attempt to expand the Online Archive, I get a error dialog box stating that the 'archive appears to be unavailable'. Outlook 2010 cannot connect to the online archive either. On the Exchange Server, in the event viewer, I see a warning, Event ID 115, 'Unable to open mailbox session fro archive mailbox', '...An unsecured or incorrectly secured fault was received from the other party...'
Any thoughts?

[#8]

We have a large number of Exchange 2003 users with considerable sized .pst's. We want to get all the .pst's into an Exchange 2010 org and then prevent their use in the future- would this be feasible using this technology? When will it ship?

Thanks in advance