In my previous post I showed how to enable archiving for an Office 365 Exchange Online user. Now, we’ll have a look at what the end user sees.

 

 

With archiving enabled when a user opens their desktop Outlook they will see an addition Archiving folder as shown above in Outlook 2010.

 

 

and the same when they login to Office Web Apps.

 

Users can now drag and drop whatever emails they wish into this archive, however creating an automatic archiving policy is more challenging.

 

 

In Outlook 2010 the normal way to manage archiving is to right mouse click on an Outlook folder and select Properties. However, when we now do this with Exchange Online archiving enabled we see a window like shown above. There is now no longer an option to archive locally, all we see is the default policy “Use Parent Folder Policy”.

 

The next problem is where can I set these policies? Turns out each user has to so this from Outlook Web App (there are other ways buts let’s just follow along with the user example for the time being).

 

 

Login as the user to Outlook Web Apps. In the top right corner select Options and then See All Options.

 

 

From here select Organise Email and then Retention Policy as shown above.

 

You can then select the Add button to add a retention policy to this mailbox.

 

 

When you do you’ll see a list of standard policies as shown above. All you can do here is select a policy and press the Add link. When you have finished press the Save button.

 

To change or add policies you’ll need to use Powershell which I’ll cover in a later post.

 

 

if you now revisit Outlook 2010 folder Properties, Policy you’ll see there is additional policy you just enabled to select from.

 

So in summary:

 

– Once email archiving is enabled a user can manually move items into that folder in Outlook on the desktop or Outlook Web App

 

– There are no specific archiving policy applied but it can only be enabled from Outlook Web App.

 

– To create or modify retention policies you are going to need to user Powershell.

 

What do you get with email archiving enabled? For any plan that includes Exchange Plan 1 the user gets a total of 25GB mailbox shared across the primary inbox and the archiving area. Otherwise the user gets 25GB for their primary mailbox and an “unlimited” archiving area.

 

• A default quota of 100GB is set on the personal archive. In the unlikely event that the user exceeds this quota a call to Office 365 support will be required. Administrators cannot adjust this quota up or down.