Chapter 13: Managing Messages in Transit

Overview

As you may have noticed by now, in spite of the extra features it offers, Exchange provides messaging as its core functionality. Messaging systems have been part of the business environment for years - long enough for the novelty of electronic messaging to wear off and for it to become a staple of the office. E-mail is now ubiquitous; right or wrong, your users think of it in the same class as utilities such as electricity, telephone service, and water. Because of this perception, the majority of messaging administrators must now deal with issues such as regulatory compliance that once were the province of a only few types of businesses.

Legacy versions of Exchange were not equipped with the tools and technology to allow administrators to effectively deal with these sorts of issues out of the box. Electronic discovery, regulatory compliance, long-term message data archival, and effective retention policies - the basic Exchange architecture was designed without these needs in mind (not that any of the common messaging systems competing with Exchange were, so it's not as if Exchange was particularly bad at dealing with them either). Yet in the modern world of messaging, they are very real problems that the majority of administrators must face to some degree. The solution has traditionally been the implementation of expensive, complicated, third-party software suites.

When setting the design goals for Exchange 2007, Microsoft wanted to ensure that it was better adapted for modern needs and problems. Wisely, the product team didn't try to become compliance experts and bake every possible needed feature into the product; if they had, we'd be seeing the first delivery sometime around 2014. Instead, they concentrated on building in key functionality and features that would make it easier for third parties to continue to develop and test Exchange 2007–compatible solutions. Software that is easier to write and test is less expensive, more trustworthy, and ultimately easier to deploy and use - all wins for you, the Exchange administrator.

In this chapter, we'll cover three of the key changes in Exchange 2007 that, while not being full-featured compliance solutions, will make it much easier for you and third-party applications to manage archival, compliance, retention, and discovery activities.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Message classifications

• Transport rules

• Message journaling