Messaging Records Management allows organizations to implement message retention policies. Exchange 2010's new MRM feature allows you to granularly apply retention policies, without impacting users' e-mail filing methods. 

Exchange Server 2007 addressed retention needs with Managed Folders. Managed Folders allow administrators to specify Managed Content Settings for mailbox folders, relying on users to move items to appropriate folders, based on retention settings of such folders.

Exchange 2010 uses a combination of Retention Tags, Retention Policies, and AutoTagging.

Exchange 2010 mailbox items use Retention Tags to apply retention settings. Retention Tags can be applied to mailbox folders and individual items. Retention Tags are associated with a Retention Policy. An administrator can assign Retention Tags to default folders such as Inbox, Deleted Items, Junk Mail, Sent Items, etc. Additional tags not associated with default folders can be included in the Retention Policy. Users use tags available to them to tag folders or items. A Default tag associated with the Retention Policy applies to items not tagged manually by the user or to items in folders that do not have tags applied.

To find out more about Retention Tags, see Understanding Retention Tags.

 AutoTagging

Although users can use rules and default tags to automatically assign tags to incoming e-mail, the amount of e-mail that requires user intervention is still a drain on users with high incoming mail flow. Auto-tagging is designed to reduce this burden from users as much as possible. With the auto-tagging approach, the system creates a machine learning model to learn from users’ tagging preferences. Once this is done, the system uses the trained model to assign tags to incoming messages. As long as the model has high prediction accuracy, the amount of messages that requires users’ intervention can be limited to a small and manageable number.

Users can manually override the tags assigned by AutoTagging.

Exchange 2010 Discovery allows a user who is assigned the Discovery Management role to search mailbox content in selected mailboxes across the entire Exchange 2010 organization. The scope of the RBAC role assignment determines which mailboxes can be searched. Messages returned by the search are copied to a folder in the specified Discovery mailbox. Discovery allows legal and IT departments to easily comply with legal discovery requirements, or search message content for purposes such as internal investigations, and messaging policy compliance. The new Discovery Management role can be assigned to a user or a security group to perform Discovery-related tasks. An easy-to-use browser-based interface accessible from the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) allows non-technical professionals to easily perform Discovery functions.

For more information about Discovery, see Understanding Discovery.

Protection of critical business information with high business value is an important aspect of information protection. Regulations in many countries, regions, and industries such as financial services and healthcare, require organizations to protection personal information collected from customers and employees. Most business communication occurs over e-mail, and a large number of users also use e-mail as a repository of information and documents.

Transport Protection Rules allow you to protect messaging content by rights-protecting e-mail messages and attachments of supported types. Transport Protection Rules apply RMS templates to messages in transport, restricting which recipients can access a message, and specifies actions that can be performed by recipients of the message, such as printing a message or an attachment, and forwarding a message. For more information, see Understanding Transport Protection Rules.

Outlook Protection Rules allow you to create rules that are executed in Microsoft Outlook to apply RMS templates to rights protect messages before they are sent. For more information, see Understanding Outlook Protection Rules.

Transport Rules inspect messages for conditions specified in the rule. Messages that meet the conditions, and none of the exceptions, get the specified actions applied to them. exExchange2010 includes several new predicates and actions, providing additional flexibility in creating rules and additional options for actions that can be applied to messages. For more information, see Transport Rule Predicates and Transport Rule Actions.

The New-TransportRule and Set-TransportRule cmdlets have been enhanced, allowing you to specify all predicates and actions in a single command. All predicates and actions are now available for use as parameters with these cmdlets. For more information, see New-TransportRule and Set-TransportRule cmdlet reference topics.