It seems that not many people have been willing to touch this subject. Microsoft announced Exchange 2010 back in April and one of the features in Exchange 2010 that got a lot of peoples attention is that it will have build in archiving, retention and eDiscovery.

Microsoft positions Exchange 2010 as a ‘personal archive’ and not as ‘business archive’ solution.  The distinction is there for many reasons.  First of all, Microsoft will with this solution only focus on allowing organizations to get rid of PST files, implement large mailboxes and provide advanced search.  It will not provide records management and preservation of electronic information beyond Exchange.  It is the larger enterprises who are going to look for a more complete solution that offers functionality beyond the basics which includes:

• Integration with software and applications to manage the eDiscovery process.  Search is not eDiscovery .. a proper eDiscovery application allows you to use advanced queries to create and narrow down search result sets, review and tag this data and more (i.e. case management)
• Allow for capturing content from more than just Exchange.  Many organizations are already capturing File System data, and are moving towards implementing SharePoint as well.  Capturing more content in a unified archive makes sense for not only storage reasons but also legal and compliance reasons.

Exchange falls short of the above, but it will probably gain traction in this space more or less with the smaller organizations that are going to look for a basic archiving solution.  These customers have been there all along and are happily served by some of the around 85 companies now in this space.

There are many things that Exchange 2010 doesn’t solve, so organizations that are looking at Exchange 2010 need to clearly understand what can be done with the application and what not.  If you are looking for case management in eDiscovery. No it is not there.. If you are looking for a solution that can locate and ingest your PST files in your network beyond the file server. No you can not do that either.  Do your homework well and make a good decision, but make sure that if you are thinking about archiving beyond Exchange (File Systems and SharePoint) even if you might not do that now but next year , you have to pick a Enterprise Vault that can offer you all that and not pick one that will block you down the road.