What is Litigation Hold feature in Exchange Server 2010?

Sometimes organizations required mechanism to store their data (including e-mail) for longer periods of time. This scenario may arise due to companies undergoing in some lawsuit. Failure in complying retention policy may expose an organization to financial and legal complexities. Litigation hold in Exchange Server 2010 enables organization to transparently hold users and keep mailbox items in an unaltered state, even from automatically deletion by MRM.

Only those authorized users can place mailboxes on hold that have added to the Discovery Management role-based access control (RBAC) role group or assigned the legal hold management role. We can use the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), Exchange Management Console (EMC) or Exchange Shell to place mailboxes on hold.

Exchange Server 2010 uses a new feature called Recoverable Items folder for litigation. This folder was previously known as the dumpster. We can set the storage quota on Recoverable Items folder for preventing any potential DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. Litigation hold enables users to be placed on hold and keep their mailbox items in an unaltered state.

Items in the Recoverable Items folder are retained for the deleted item retention period configured on the mailbox database, which is set to 14 days by default and then purged by the Exchange. Once mailbox is put on litigation hold, the Recoverable Items folder is not purged and items in this folder are retained indefinitely.  The Recoverable Items folder is hidden from the default view of Microsoft Outlook, OWA and other email client software. Recoverable Items folder contains three sub-folders:-

1.       Deletion When an end user deletes items from the “Deleted Items”, those items are moved to the Recoverable Items/Deletion folder which can be recovered from the “Recover Deleted Items” window.

2.       Purges Items are moved to this folder when user purges data from the “Recover Deleted Items” view or when MRM purges data from Recoverable Items/Deletions folder due to maximum retention limit set.  

3.       Versions Items are moved to this folder when users make any changes in the original mailbox items. The original copy is saved in the Recoverable Items/Versions folder.

How to enable Litigation Hold from Exchange Management Console (EMC):

1.       Open the Exchange Management Console (EMC).

2.       Expand Recipient Configuration and click Mailbox.

3.       Open then Properties of any mailbox that you want to place on litigation hold.

4.       Click on the Mailbox Settings tab in the Properties tab.

5.       Select Messaging Records Management and click on Properties.

6.       Select the “Enable Litigation Hold” checkbox to enable this feature on the selected mailbox.

a.       Messaging Records Management Description URL- You can use this option to enter the URL containing more information and help document on litigation hold feature to the Microsoft Outlook 2010 users.

b.      Comments- Enter any text that you would like to display to the Microsoft Outlook 2010 users.

                   

Note: - you will be notified once you enable this feature that it may take 60 minutes for this feature to take effect.

How to enable Litigation Hold from Shell:-

Run the below command to enable litigation hold feature on user, mike:-

Set-Mailbox mike@learnmsexchange.com -LitigationHoldEnabled $true