Part 1: Advanced Discovery and Compliance with Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft announced the launch of Microsoft Office 365 this week, which combines the familiar Office desktop suite with cloud-based versions of Microsoft’s next-generation communications and collaboration services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

This is a very big announcement for Microsoft, but it’s also a big announcement for the archiving industry.  

Consequently, I decided to do a three-part blog series to provide greater context.  In this post, I will highlight the need for enterprises to consider the role of compliance and e-discovery in their Microsoft Office 365 purchase decision.  In part two, I will explain the variety of archiving options offered with the different Office 365 plans. Lastly, I will discuss the value of a third-party archive, like LiveOffice, to Office 365 as a virtual safety net, or backup copy, for your data.

Microsoft’s Personal Archive

Office 365 includes a Personal Archive (not to be confused with LiveOffice’s own Personal Archive) and some advanced archiving capabilities (including multi-mailbox search, legal holds and retention management) available in select plans. Microsoft’s Personal Archive is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside the users’ primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App. Users can access the archive in the same way that they access their primary mailboxes. 

Office 365 Compliance and E-Discovery

With some enterprise plans (E3 and E4), you can get advanced archiving functionality including:

• Retention Policies:  with this feature, you can apply retention settings to specific folders in users’ inboxes, give users a menu of retention policies and let them apply the policies to specific items, conversations, or folders using Outlook 2010 or Outlook Web App. 
• Legal Holds: For legal hold capabilities, Office 365 relies on Exchange Online to preserve users’ deleted and edited mailbox items (including email messages, appointments, and tasks) from both their primary mailboxes and personal archives. 
• Multi-Mailbox Search: Through the Exchange Control Panel within Office 365, administrators can search a variety of mailbox items—including email messages, attachments, calendar appointments, tasks, and contacts to satisfy legal discovery requests. Administrators can use this feature to simultaneously search across primary mailboxes and personal archives. Learn more here.
• Archive Delegate Access: Office 365 uses Exchange Online Archiving to support delegated access—that is, users’ ability to allow others to access and manage their email and calendars. So, an assistant can access his manager’s primary mailbox and archive.

 An Additional Layer of Functionality and Comfort

While Office 365 offers some integrated compliance and e-discovery features, some organizations may find that they need additional functionality for advanced e-discovery and regulatory compliance.  LiveOffice also provides deep Office 365 integration that helps them meet more complex e-discovery and compliance requirements

Companies should also consider the types of Office 365 messages and content that they may want to archive beyond email down the road.  Increasingly, companies are looking to archive SharePoint Online files and instant messages (Lync Online) into a common, searchable archive for e-discovery purposes. You should also seek out solutions that simplify and automate user management (e.g., syncing with Office 365's admin console) in order to minimize the IT overhead.

Below are some of the benefits that LiveOffice cloud archiving offers to Office 365 users:

We are excited to see Microsoft helping to mainstream archiving by baking it into Office 365, while relying on their partners to provide Office 365 users with the advanced capabilities they need to meet their unique business requirements.