Retention Policy Best Practices

Retention policies should be carefully constructed and implemented so as to achieve organizational objectives. The following best practices well help you avoid unintended consequences.

• Determine your business requirements before setting up a retention policy.

Retention policies should reflect your organization's overall records retention and compliance objectives. Before setting up any retention policies, determine what you are trying to achieve, under what constraints your organization works (financial, organizational, statutory), and rank the types of retention you want to achieve from most to least important. Planning for your needs in advance can save the time and frustration from having to change retention policies after implementation.

• Email Archival settings do not override mail server settings.

It is up to you to determine that your retention policies mesh smoothly with those on your mail server, and vice versa. For example, don’t set your retention policy for 14 days when your mail server purges all messages after 30 days.

• Higher priority policies always override lower priority polices, even those of longer duration.

Retention policies with a higher priority will always override those of a lower priority, even when the lower priority policy has a longer duration. For example, if the Executive retention policy specifies a retention duration of three years and is ranked higher than a Legal retention policy that specifies a retention of five years, then a CEO who was a member of both groups would only have his messages retained for three years.

To avoid unintentional purging of messages intended to be retained for a longer period, ensure that policies with longer durations are prioritized higher than those with shorter durations.

Retention Policy Name	Retention Period	Priority in AMS Admin Console	Result
Executive	3 years	1	Messages tagged under the Executive retention policy are kept for 3 years.
Legal	5 years	2	Messages tagged under the Legal retention policy are kept for 5 years. Because this policy has a lower priority than the Executive policy, messages tagged under both policies are kept for only 3 years. To keep messages tagged under both policies for the longer duration, reverse the priority in the AMS Admin Console so that the longer duration policy has a higher priority.

• Set the default retention duration to at least 30 days.

Make sure your retention policy is sufficient to achieve all organization objectives. Older messages can always be purged when necessary, but they cannot be reconstructed after purging if they are suddenly needed later.

• Overlap durations for Email Archival and Storage Management policies.

If you have both Email Archival and Storage Management (stubbing) components, there should be at least one week duration overlap to ensure that no items set to be stubbed will be deleted before stubbing. For example, if Storage Management is set to start at 30 days, basic retention duration should be set to at least 37 days. See Storage Management for more details.

• Avoid using membership-based policies, where possible.

Membership-Based policies are appropriate for retaining messages for retention holds. They are not an adequate substitute for capture-based policies.