Part 2: Demystifying your Archiving Options with Office 365

With Office 365, enterprises have a number of archiving options depending on the plan they select.

For enterprises and its information workers, Office 365 comes in four flavors or plans. E1 is the most basic plan and does not include the new Office Web Apps starting at $10/user/month while E4, the richest plan from a feature/functionality perspective, is $27/user/month.

The Office 365 Plans

Your Archiving Options

Office 365 offers two types of archiving built into Exchange Online: Personal Archive (included with all plans) and advanced archiving capabilities (only included with the pricier E3 and E4 plans).

Here's a quick recap of each of your archiving options:

1. Office 365 Personal Archive: Personal Archive is an email archiving feature intended to allow you to reduce or eliminate PST files by provisioning archive mailboxes for your users. Personal Archive is a specialized mailbox associated with a user’s primary mailbox and appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App, giving users direct access to archived email in the same way as non-archived email. Users can drag-and-drop messages from the active mailbox to the personal archive. NOTE: In E1, users get 25 GBs of mailbox  space within Exchange Online, but this space is split between the user's primary mailbox and the user's personal archive.

2. Office 365 Advanced Archive Capabilities: The “advanced archiving capabilities” associated with the E3 and E4 plans, include:

• Retention: Automated and time-based criteria for retention which can be set at an item or folder level
• Legal Holds: Capture all deletes and edits, offers single item restore and notifies users on hold.  This includes auto aging of content from your primary to archive dumpster.
• Audit:  This includes an audit trail for configurations, mailbox and discovery audits, and reporting and exports.
• Multi-Mailbox Search:  This includes a Web-based UI within the Exchange Control Panel and allows authorized users to search primary, archive and recoverable items. This also provides search statistics, de-duplication, annotations and auditing functionality.
   

3. LiveOffice Advanced Compliance and Discovery:  LiveOffice offers advanced compliance (e.g., SEC/FINRA), e-discovery and data protection (i.e., a second copy of your Office 365 data) functionality that tightly integrates with all Office 365 plans. This integration allows Exchange Administrators to more easily manage users and distribution lists from one central place within the Office 365 Directory . Learn more about this integration here.  Plus, we can archive additional Office 365 content beyond email including SharePoint Online and Lync Online (coming later this year). 

Check out my first blog post in this series for why some companies may need these advanced features. Better yet, stop by our booth (#1210) at this week's Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference ) in Los Angeles.