Exchange 2010 Litigation Hold

A feature not widely used by Exchange administrators is Litigation Hold which was introduced in Exchange 2010 RTM. In some cases, there may be no need or regulatory requirement to implement it but, there are instances where users do not implement it due to lack of understanding of what exactly Litigation Hold is and how it differs from Single Item Recovery and Retention Hold.

Litigation is, simply put, the conduct of a lawsuit. When an employee or an organization faces a lawsuit or even expects one, it is required to keep all information related to the case, whether this is information on paper or most commonly, electronically stored. If all relevant information is not kept, the subject of the lawsuit might undergo further legal action, sanctions or fines.

Nowadays e-mail plays a very important role in these situations due to its vast use and it is crucial to keep every single e-mail message related to the case. But how do you prevent users from advertently or inadvertently deleting e-mails needed for the investigation? What about Messaging Records Management? Do you just temporarily disable it for all your Exchange databases? This is where Litigation Hold comes in, allowing administrators to easily:

• Preserve deleted or edited mailbox items (by users);

• Preserve automatically deleted mailbox items (by MRM);

• Search and capture items placed on hold;

All of this is easily achieved my simply placing a mailbox on Litigation Hold as you can see in this article in MSExchange.org.