When I heard about it in Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009 session, I got a feeling that it is a very big feature that every one should look into it. Though I couldn’t understand it properly in that session, I did some search/research after coming back to my desk to know what it is and below are the points I collected about it.
#1. First of all it’s a not great feature that every corporate will get benefited largely. But one can enable this feature on requirement basis looking at the functionality it has
#2. It gives a secondary mailbox for every user which will appear under your normal mailbox in outlook/OWA. No additional configuration is needed, if the archive feature is enabled outlook detects it automatically and adds it into your configuration.
#3. You can migrate all your PST data to this archive mailbox and you can access the data when you are in roaming. You can migrate your PSTs by just doing drag drop operation onto archive mailbox
#4. You can configure retention policies in primary mailbox to move the items into archive mailbox.
#5. You can maintain separate quotas for your primary and archive mailboxes. This results in high performance and speed of your primary mailbox while you store your large amount of mails in archive mailbox.
#6. Search across primary and secondary(archive) mailboxes is possible
#7. You can either choose to keep primary and archive mailboxes on same store or in different stores based on your requirement and frequency of archive access.
I haven’t tested these features any lab environment as my E2010 lab is not ready yet. I will post more and correct my self if required after doing so.
See this blog entry for nice explanation of archive feature and few FAQs.
Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.